Word: bumming
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Radio Bum. Skinny, wry Tom Howard swears he turned comedian because he hated to get up in the morning. Irish-born (County Tyrone) son of a bricklayer, he was clerking in a Philadelphia grocery store and his name was then George Black. Then he noticed that actors seemed to sleep late mornings. He began copying every gesture of a Keith headline act about a political boob, got a chance to give his imitation at Minersville...
...burlesque, vaudeville, Howard made the big time in Joe Cook's Rain Or Shine in 1928, hit $1,100 a week in Ziegfeld's Smiles, and then went to Hollywood with Shelton to store some of their deadpan senselessness in celluloid. Howard claims that "radio made a bum out of me" and he is reconciled to it. The hours are wonderful; he has to work only a couple of days a week; and for his unsophisticated radio audience there is no need to think up new material...
When she dies, Danny makes the great decision, prepares to bum his way to bookloving Manhattan. He will never reach it in a Farrell novel: Novelist Farrell is about to drop Danny in favor of a new character named Bernard Claire. Farrell's next book will report Hero Claire's career among Manhattan's intellectuals during the boom years and the depression. Says Novelist Farrell slyly...
...Callahan the Bum, who whiled away most of a summer afternoon trying to hang himself on one of the main streets and gave up in disgust because nobody would notice...
Patriot. In Brooklyn, N.Y., Bernard Schwartz, charged with evading the draft, explained that he was a bum and had been afraid of demoralizing the Army...