Word: 20s
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Bite the Dusk. Daniel Laverock is a stout-bodied chap in his 20s, of good family and a surpassing ugliness. When he finds himself jobless in the Depression '30s, he gets a job as manager of the Pantheon, a wretched Fowlers End movie-vaudeville house owned by Sam Yudenow. It is Sam who dominates the book, a grasping, greedy, devious monster whose hilariously disarranged speech makes the best lines attributed to Sam Goldwyn read like decorous bits from Fowler's Modern English Usage. He is a devoted movie fan, particularly of westerns: "Bing, bash, bosh-another foreskin bites...
Many factors caused the shortage of skilled manpower. Because of the low birth rate in the '30s, the proportion of men in their 20s (the training age) has dropped drastically, while the total work force has rapidly increased. Unions are also at fault. Some, still thinking in Depression terms, limit the number of apprentices they will accept for training. More important, the emphasis of industrial unions on raising the pay of the unskilled has discouraged workers from learning a trade, especially since apprentice wages are far less than unskilled pay. The skilled worker's pay advantage over...
Mezzo Linda McNaughton of the Fair Lady chorus (and recent award winner in the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air) added her voice to both roles as the spirit moved her. Most of the singers are in their 20s, and all of them are good-looking and enthusiastic about the training they are getting. "They think singing A Masked Ball in private." says Allers, "makes them sing My Fair Lady better in public...
...carefree '20s came Gene Austin, asweet-voiced tenor whose story was evocatively told last week on NBC-TV's Goodyear Playhouse. Millions of televiewers had never heard of him, but other millions (over 40) had grown up and fallen in and out of love listening to him sing on records or radio. After thumping a piano in brothels around the country, then touring in vaudeville, Gene began recording, and chiefly between 1924 and 1930 sold 86 million records. Barrel-shaped but still velvet-throated at 56, Tenor Austin, singing the sound track, brought back the nostalgic old daze...
Licensed Jester. By the time Low was ready for London in 1919, he had whittled the heavy chip on his provincial, radical, colonial shoulder into quite a weapon. He knew how to de-stuff shirts, e.g., he recalls that Austen Chamberlain, Britain's Foreign Secretary in the '20s, could not read very well through his celebrated monocle; that Stanley Baldwin, famed for his pipe-puffing, "probably smoked cigarettes in private...