Word: droll
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...from Chicago's City News Bureau. After a stint at general assignments and politics, he went to Washington and became bureau chief in 1914. Henning was one of the favored reporters William Howard Taft called in for press conferences around the Cabinet table. There, Taft regaled them with droll stories, "shaking," says Henning, "like a bowl full of jelly." Henning found Woodrow Wilson irascible and short-tempered, and Calvin Coolidge a man who "would talk your arm off if you gave him a chance...
...farm policy. In his heyday as president of the rich American Farm Bureau Federation (membership: 1,275,000), he had no peer as a Washington lobbyist. He knew when to cajole, when to burst into anger, when to be imperious, when to recite statistics, when to tell a droll story. The Agricultural Adjustment Act was the result of Ed O'Neal's ideas. He "nominated" Henry Wallace for Secretary of Agriculture, backed his crop-control program ("Plow the little pigs under"), persistently pushed parity payments onward & upward...
...audience upstairs to the famous Pudding after-the-show cabaret humming good tunes and roaring at the mere thought of Theodore Allegretti. Recent patrons of Sanders Theatre probably remember Allegretti as an intense young man with a flare for speechifying. But it is as a comedian, occasionally whimsical and droll but usually nothing short of hilarious, that he stands out in a show which is full of entertainment value, from book and music on down through sets and costumes...
Like many conservative New Englanders, the 100-year-old Boston Herald regards tradition as no laughing matter. Yet for 16 years it has permitted itself and its readers a daily exception. In the cartoons of droll, deadpanned Francis W. Dahl, it has needled the Watch & Ward Society, kidded the champions of real New England (tomato-less) clam chowder,*poked fun at the customs and costumes of Beacon Hill...
Ever since Fred Allen joined Benny, Bergen, McGee & Hope, no rival network has been able to break NBC's hammer lock on humor. Last week, little ABC weighed in a promising challenger: droll, deadpan Henry Morgan. His first coast-to-coast half hour (Tues., 8:30-9 p.m., E.D.S.T.) was the freshest and funniest new show in years. Morgan's secret weapon: a needle that tickles...