Word: bummed
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...take off again. But you can never be sure. Last year I was twice thrown off planes on which the airlines had contracted to fly me because the gate had no record of my reconfirmation, though I did. American bumped me in particularly annoying circumstances, giving me the bum's rush at LaGuardia, and so making me a day late for an important meeting, while it sent my bags on to Knoxville and left me to spend a night in New York without pajamas. My reconfirmation was acknowledged in grease pencil on my ticket-envelope...
...quite a bigger proposition than an ordinary bum, however. You can't just walk up to a loitering bus and tell it to move along, bud. You have to have a decree, which often means a great deal more work for the city clerks, and everyone knows they have all they can do. Besides, they and their friends vote...
...hard-working Brooklyn boy who started out in an amateur-night act in 1931. He gagged his way into nightclubs and theaters, later made out passably well in a few Broadway shows and movies. "I was," he says, "a fairly well-known bum." A dabbler of sorts, he has twice played serious roles on TV dramatic shows, conducts and writes music, although he cannot read notes ("I use numbers and arrows, then I call in an arranger and tell him what I want"). His newest hobby, psychic research, may prove profitable, for he is planning a TV show that will...
Topping last week's bestseller list was Mr. Sandman (Cadence), featuring the piping voices of the Chordettes, beginning with chime effects ("bum, bum, bum, bum") and paced by the clip-clop sounds of Archie Bleyer slapping his knees. Sample Mr. Sandman lyric: "Give him a lonely heart like Pagliacci, and lots of wavy hair like Liberace." No. 4 bestseller: Teach Me Tonight (Abbott), with the DeCastro Sisters in a twangy, eagerly enunciated request for seduction. The melody is in the contralto, while the other girls warble country-alto above. No. 11 but climbing fast: The Naughty Lady of Shady...
...Lenin? Or Kingsley Martin? Or Franklin Roosevelt? Or Emily Post? Or Freud? As for my friends and me, words failed us. Neither our education nor our experience nor our principles had prepared us for this encounter. Ours is, indeed, a rich and wonderful country-glamorous beyond belief. A bum can no longer suffer mere misfortune; he must be "rolled by a beautiful call girl." And he is not friendless. Far from it; he has only to appear in Wall Street to have his credit and identity restored. I returned to my office filled with awe. What dreams we Americans...