Word: flopped
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...popular and publicity success, the New York World's Fair of 1939 was a financial flop. By midseason, exhibitors and merchants holding $28,000,000 of its 4% debentures had forced out overconfident Grover Whalen, put Banker Harvey Dow Gibson (Manufacturers Trust Co.) in charge of the books. In September, to help the Fair pay its bills, bondholders had to sacrifice their 40% lien on the gate receipts. During 1939, the bonds dropped from...
...Nearly a Flop. Monday and Tuesday the Convention's first two days, were black days for the bosses. Their delegates roamed like rambunctious mavericks, uttering mating calls, nickering for sympathy, stampeding in any direction, unbossed and unled. At first they liked it. But Joe Martin's gavel raps were deadlines as well as calls to order; choices had to be made. Everywhere were men waiting only to be really convinced that here was the man, in him the only issues...
...busy practicing his theosophic belief that because Divine Providence had led him to money it was his holy duty to spend it. In 1926 he backed a Broadway play, The Ladder, for an old playwright schoolmate. Believing in its theme of reincarnation. Angel Davis stubbornly kept the play (a flop) going for two years, eventually admitted the public free. The whim cost him a cool $1,300,000 before he had had enough. Going back to Texas to drill for more oil, he watched the last of his capital disappear into his pet "deep oil" holes. There is a legend...
Ideological Flip-Flop. Greatest surprise of all came when Vicente Lombardo Toledano, vociferous tsar of the Communistic C. T. M. (Confederation de Trabajadores de Mexico), suddenly did a complete ideological flip-flop and, after denouncing gringo imperialism a week before, suddenly turned prodemocratic. Addressing the important Latin-American Confederation of Labor, he left his audience goggle-eyed with surprise by declaring, "There was never truer friendship between North American and Latin-American peoples. We Mexicans feel great current cordiality, sympathy and profound friendship uniting us. We must fight fascism to the death and preserve democracy." Amused at his sudden conversion...
...anyone within earshot, the tall-talking southwesterner blustered about his stunt (which never actually happened) of getting married under floodlights at the home plate of a Houston ball park, about his registering at three St. Louis hotels at one time so that he could flop when he liked. On sizzling hot days he would build a bonfire in front of the Cardinal dugout, wrap himself in a blanket, do an Indian war dance. One night, out of ennui in a Philadelphia hotel, he and two teammates, dressed in painters' overalls, dragged ladders and paint cans into a crowded...