Word: caesar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When James Caesar Petrillo finally agreed to a series of interviews for TIME'S cover story on him in the Jan. 26 issue, he shook a warning finger at our Chicago bureau reporters and boomed: "You do I a cover on Colonel McCormick and he's gotta newspaper and can answer back. You do one on Roosevelt or Truman and they can get on the radio and talk to millions of people. I can't get my story across. If I could have all the People in America in one hall for one hour...
...James Caesar Petrillo cannot see germs, at least not very well, but they do not fool him. He knows there are armies of them all around him : hairy ones with mil lions of eyes, wiggly ones with transparent heads, sloppy ones shaped like tomato sur prises, stiff ones which look like piccolos in aspic. He never forgets that they are coming at him, morning, noon & night. But he is not intimidated. He fights them...
...grand sachem, lord paramount and international president of the American Federation of Musicians, Caesar Petrillo has an imperial disdain for convention, and, when confronted by bacteria, he will stop at nothing. He roars like a wounded lion if a photographer lays a camera down near him; he believes microbes use cam eras as invasion barges to leap...
...does so with a comparatively relaxed air-something like a lion-tamer lobbing house cats into the chandelier of a Sunday morning. His real enemies are the phonograph record and its cousins, the motion picture sound track and the radio station turntable. He is mortally afraid that without James Caesar Petrillo, all the music in the U.S. would eventually be produced by one non-union musician playing a musical comb into a microphone...
...while any negotiations involving Petrillo were always as unstable as nitroglycerin, neither side seemed to yearn for a showdown battle. For all their public outcry against him, the big men of the music industry respected, and in some cases, admired, Caesar Petrillo. He was honest, and until his mind was set, he was always open to persuasion. His word was as good as gold...