Word: butches
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This vast daily fountain of print is a national press. But it is also a hometown press and as such, for nine long years, it had been full to bursting with news of its own kinetic, photogenic mayor, Fiorello Henry ("Butch") LaGuardia. Whether as fire buff, civic scold, uplifter, ambulance chaser, hemisphere-defense expert, official greeter, fashion critic or hometown booster, Butch always has been copy. And the press has been good to him. Few politicians have ever received the continuous campaign support that New York's newspapers have bestowed on their bumptious little dictator and fiery reformer...
...Mayor has not responded in kind. Suspicious of the press from the first, he nonetheless got along well enough with them for a while. Then Butch decided to abandon regular press conferences. The occupants of "Room 9" (City Hall pressroom) took that in stride and kept the copy rolling. He got mad at a reporter, tried and failed to persuade his publisher to fire him. Warier after that, Room Niners still kept up the coverage...
This harmless charade has a certain honky-tonk charm for which those who liked Damon Runyon's Butch Minds the Baby will be warmly prepared. The talk is the patented Runyon brand of Times Square Swahili, in which a worn-out race horse is "practically mucilage," and marriage is described as "one room, two chins, three kids." There is the usual Runyon corps de ballet of ham-hearted grifters, heisters and passers, played by a friendly crowd of veterans from Hollywood (Eugene Pallette, Louise Beavers) and Broadway (Sam Levene, Millard Mitchell). Carefully solemn Henry Fonda has the dignity...
...Mountains gave way to hills and around about their bases lapped greyish yellow waters. The Yangtze is in flood and we are drawing near our target, I thought. I crawled through the tunnel under the pilot's seat and came out in the glassed bombardier's compartment. Butch Morgan sat in the very nose of the ship, peering down his bombsight. I sat in the seat directly behind him with my knees in his back, peering down below and watching the yellow snake of the Yangtze drawing closer. Over to the right high up on a mountain, appeared...
Suddenly there lay the city, a narrow strip of black below us, on the very edge of the south bank of the muddy Yangtze. Butch spun the dials on his bomb sights. I heard the rumbling of an electric motor. The bomb bays were opening. I looked at the double row of little lights, numbered from one to twelve, like lights on an elevator. They were still shining brightly. The bombs had not yet been released. Haynes dipped the plane up and down, giving the signal to those behind us to attack...