Word: block
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Twenty years ago, high up over Wall Street, an early-bird office boy named Martin Block used to tear a page off Owen D. Young's calendar every morning, turn on the office ozone machine, then listen to earfuls of advice (8:55 to 9) from the big boss himself. Nowadays Martin Block, the dapper $50,000-a-year impresario, prizes that advice highly. "I had better than a college education," he reflects. "I had five minutes a day, six days a week, two and a half years with Owen D. Young...
...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...
Nobody had any copyright on the idea, and Martin Block went to Manhattan's WNEW with it, at $20 a week. Along came the Hauptmann trial, and Block's big chance. His assignment was to fill in between bulletins from the courtroom. He bought a couple of records, treated himself (for $10) to a tryout sponsor, an unheralded reducing pill at $1 a box. "Now I'm not saying that your husband doesn't love you," he soft-soaped, "but when you look into the mirror, are you being fair to him?" Next morning...
...years Martin Block, softly recommending brides to Michaels Credit Department Store, husbands to the Madison Personal Loan service, listeners to the trumped-up rigmarole of his Make-Believe Ballroom, had made $60,000. Slim, trim, gently mustached, he is a darling of the jitterbug trade, has over 2,000,000 regular listeners a week, makes $20,000 a year extra for personal appearances, at $300 per. The Make-Believe Ballroom idea has spread to other cities, offers brisk competition to network stations wherever it exists...
...when Count Csáky, in the course of his travelogue, arrived at the Rumanian border, his tone grew tough. That country, he said, was the chief stumbling block to a Danubian bloc of neutrals. Until Rumania decided to listen to the "voice of the new era"-i.e., hand back to Hungary Transylvania, which Rumania took at the end of World War I-Hungary would refuse to play ball. "It is up to Rumania to accept the ideas of modern times and thus cooperate in forming a new order on the Danube," threatened the Foreign Minister. "Otherwise history will...