Word: brakeman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...made almost no use of electronics. "Every ship and every plane," says Caldwell, "is in constant touch with the rest of the world by radio - but every railroad train crew is utterly isolated while in motion." To stop another train, trainmen still follow the "archaic practice" of sending a brakeman up the track with a lantern or flag...
...Brakeman Rodgers. For years hillbilly music remained a branch of folklore to most urban Americans - if they knew of it at all. But in 1921 a Kansas City-born folklore fan named Ralph Peer (then sales manager for Okeh Records) took a recording apparatus into the backwoods of Georgia and made some 300 disks. As an experiment, Okeh issued Peer's recordings, listing them in a special catalogue similar to those used for foreign language and "race" records. Within a few years Okeh's hillbilly list sold over a million disks-mostly below the Mason-Dixon line...
...attracted by Okeh's success, Victor decided to enter the field, unearthed in Bristol, Va. a former Southern Railway brakeman named Jimmie Rodgers. His quaintly drawling voice soon became the biggest thing in hillbilly minstrelsy...
Late last week ex-Brakeman Jeffers proudly bounced an all-synthetic military tire before the Senate Agriculture Committee, added that the synthetic program was going so well that many substitute plans had been ash-canned, and he himself hoped to go back to his railroad by summertime. The once-ballyhooed guayule plan has been slashed from 200,000 acres to a paltry 15,000; schemes like cryptostegia vines, home-grown rubber trees and dandelions are headed the same way (see p, 54). Then he sent the hopes of U.S. motorists up: "By April 1944 . . . civilians will begin...
...over, Pinza spent a brief spell as brakeman on a railroad, then got a chance to sing King Mark in Tristan und Isolde at the Teatro Reale dell' Opera in Rome. Soon his reputation was made. Arturo Toscanini gave him a contract at Milan's famed La Scala opera house. There the late impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza signed him for the Metropolitan. Last year, despite the fact that Basso Pinza had his first citizenship papers, the FBI got irritated at some patriotic Italian speeches he had made, interned him, but released him eleven weeks later...