Word: lester
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...automakers were unanimous in their answer. "Another publicity maneuver," shot back General Motors Corp. President Harlow H. Curtice. Retorted Chrysler Corp. President Lester Lum Colbert: "You are proposing that management abdicate its responsibilities-and that months after sustaining a drastically reduced income, a company would go before the U.A.W. or before a three-man panel to attempt to justify its need for partial relief." Henry Ford II: "The rapid increases in wages of automobile workers over the past ten years, which were negotiated under the duress of your demands, have unquestionably contributed to inflation. Thus, having poured gasoline...
...balls in the fall, at the canopied weddings in June; two generations of debutantes have been presented, courted and married under the batons of such bandleaders as Meyer Davis and Emil Coleman. Perhaps the busiest of the musical blue bloods is a springy, raw-nerved little man named Lester Lanin, who believes that nothing in life is more important than serving good music to "society...
Like his rivals in the business, 51-year-old Conductor Lanin has a pool of several hundred musicians. On a busy night he may have as many as 25 Lester Lanin groups blaring his bouncy arrangements from Maine to Maryland. He himself shows up mainly at top-drawer affairs, e.g., last week a Newport dinner dance in honor of Perle Mesta, before that at Southampton's Tennis Ball and Newport's Tiffany Ball. There are enough such affairs to keep Lanin on the bandstand most nights of the year...
...Fixture. Grandfather Lanin started the family in the band business 118 years ago in Europe. Lester's father, also a bandleader, traveled to local weddings and hoedowns around Philadelphia in a creaking wagon, raised a family of nine musicians. Young Lester got an early taste of what society likes to dance to by hanging around the ballroom of Philadelphia's Bellevue-Stratford Hotel and listening through the doors. By the early '30s he had heard enough to move to New York and start out on his own. During the war he piped for charity and service balls...
Lanin may charge $90 for a two-man short turn or as much as $15,000 for a nightlong ball with full band. Although he generally stops playing at the contracted hour, well-heeled and well-oiled bloods, their Lester Lanin beanies askew, occasionally dance up to him and slip him $500 or so to keep things jamming till sunrise. Lanin is more flexible about his fees than most society bandleaders. To cultivate a future clientele, he will play for almost nothing for the subdeb crowd or the allowance-ridden young men of Princeton, Harvard and Yale...