Word: caesar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...week for the harmonica. James Caesar Petrillo declared that it was a sure-enough, wage-earning musical instrument, and that professional harmonica players would have to join his musicians' union. Beamed Petrillo: "Now that it's getting so that people want to hear harmonicas, we're going to take them in. I'm for the people...
...Julius Caesar, another Ides of March was ahead, though this time the main conspirator looked more like Fanny Farmer than Cassius. She is a serious Midwestern schoolmarm, with a bent for poetry, baking cakes, and puttering in a garden. But if Miss Lenore Geweke (pronounced gave-a-key) has her way-and she well might-Latin beginners all over the U.S. will no longer fight their way through Caesar's trim, tight prose...
Miss Geweke began plotting more than ten years ago, and has already won some powerful support. With a Ph.D. in the classics, and years of Latin teaching behind her, she had seen too many schoolkids make hard going of Caesar's Gallic War. When they finished at the end of the second year of Latin, most of them usually dropped Latin forever. Miss Geweke's plan: if most schoolkids are only going to take two years of Latin, why not give them "the best Latin"? Why not give them Vergil and his Aeneid...
...irregularities. Besides, boys at least, liked to read about wars. Rubbish, said Miss Geweke. There was adventure and glamor in the Aeneid ("It contains an exciting love affair"). It was a masterpiece, "the most balanced work in all Latin literature." And it was certainly no harder than Caesar, with his long, closely knit sentences, his use of subjunctives, indirect discourse and the historical present. The Classical Association of the Middle West and South (she is chairman of its educational policies committee) backed her up, and the American Council of Learned Societies gave her $7,500 to prove her point...
Solemnly Yo Ho. Lovey looked like Julius Caesar, and behaved like him whenever possible. When guests were, in the house, breakfasting on the terrace, she appeared above, them, framed in the bathroom window, and lectured them for an hour or so, "as impressive as Mussolini addressing his massed followers." Her favorite song was The Trail of the Lonesome Pine; but she was nearly as devoted to a radio commercial, "Yo ho yo ho yo ho yo ho, we are the makers of Wonder Bread." Cryptograms fascinated her too; she could never have enough of her favorite...