Word: betterment
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Martin Block decided that there must be better rackets than tearing off Mr. Young's calendar. He found he had a purling, pitchman-style voice that made people buy things. He bought an old Buick, installed a phonograph, a microphone and loudspeaker, parked it under the windows of a chocolate yeast company's directors' meeting, let go with The Stars and Stripes Forever and a blaring, vitaminy commercial. At the music, directorial paunches creased over the window sills. At the commercial, three directors rushed downstairs, hired Martin and his noisemaker at $450 a week to plug chocolate...
Block has 19 sponsors, who chip in a total of about $325,000 a year for air time and Block's "talent" services-turning records, purring commercials, keeping the Ballroom chatty and glittery. Last week Martin Block signed a new contract for five years at better than $30,000 a year. At the contract's end, he expects to retire, at 43, to live on his annuities. Says he-and this time he is not quoting Owen D. Young: "Don't let anyone tell you they can't live without working...
...James W. Fesler, who could hear the weekly broadcast much better in their own front parlor (in the studio the music sounds almost as if it were being played under a blanket), make special weekly train trips to Manhattan to see the Maestro conduct in the fiery flesh. Two Buffalo newlyweds recently made Studio 8-H their Niagara Falls. One Texan chartered a plane to get there. Refugees from Central Europe spend their first two cents on U. S. soil to stamp a letter to NBC asking for passes. Bootleg passes retail at $25 a pair. Last week, when Toscanini...
...ambition of his mother, Frau Anna Strauss. Her husband Johann, one of the doggiest of Vienna's gay dogs, transgressed (to the extent of five illegitimate children) with an attractive milliner named Emilie Trampusch. Frau Strauss kept a stiff upper lip, concentrated on making her Johann II a better man than his father. So while Johann I gadded about, Johann II composed and practiced the organ in church. His teachers, who expected him to write Masses and oratorios, were scandalized to find him playing a waltz on the organ. "It had been intended for a fugue," he explained...
Meantime, October railroad carloadings were up 18.7% over last year. This was not surprising. For 15 years, whether traffic is good or bad, trucks have tended to do a little better than railroads. In 1925, when anybody with enough spare cash for a second-hand truck could go into the trucking business, trucks carried less than 2% of all U. S. freight. The rest was taken care of by the railroads (76%), waterways (17%), pipe lines (5%). By 1937 trucks were up to 5%, railroads down to 66%, and the process apparently still goes...