Word: lead
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...getting only four hits and driving in only one run in the first eight games of the season. Every time he went to bat he felt that all the baseball fans in the world could hear him creak. When he got a hit he ran as though there were lead in his shoes. He missed low throws and grounders. Convinced that he was a hindrance rather than a help to his team, 35-year-old Lou Gehrig last week asked Manager Joe McCarthy to remove him from the Yankee lineup...
This plea, crooned in a soft baritone over the twanging of a cracked and patched guitar, once swayed Texas' Governor Pat Morris Neff into granting a pardon to the coal-black, swampland Negro who sang it. The Negro, Huddie ("Lead Belly") Ledbetter, self-styled "King of de twelve-string guitar players of de worl'," had been sentenced seven years before for murdering another Negro in a brawl over a woman. Out of jail, Lead Belly combined his career of gin, women and song with a job in a Houston Buick agency. Five years later, in 1930, Lead Belly...
...Taking Lead Belly north with him to Manhattan, Folklorist Lomax gave him a first shove up the ladder by presenting him in a concert before radio scouts, theatrical agents and pressmen. Lead Belly prospered, bought himself a new guitar, drawled his rhyme-sprouting improvisations in concert halls and over the air. In 1935 he sent for his best girl, swarthy Martha Promise, a Shreveport, La. laundress, and married her in one of the "shoutin'est" suburban weddings Manhattan's Negro colony had ever seen...
...last week it was the old story. Standing in Manhattan General Sessions, greying, 54-year-old Lead Belly once again heard a jury pronounce him guilty. Offense: stabbing and slashing Henry Burgess, another Negro, at a party in a Westside rooming house...
With a superbly fast start, Vince Bailey paced the fifties out to a deek-length lead immediately at a beat of forty. From then on the Crimson crew gradually lengthened the lead until the half-mile mark at a 36, where it settled down to a stroke far lower than its opponents and kept its position to the end of the race...