Word: maddening
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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There is no heaven for broken-down prize fighters. But after the last bell has clanged for his last fight, many a boxer has turned barkeep. Joe Madden, onetime lightweight, is probably the only ex-pug who can trace his clicking cash register to his ability to write rather than fight. One night last week 500 of Madden's loyal customers jammed his Manhattan-cafe. Tennist Alice Marble sang, Sportswriter Richards Vidmer helped wait on table. They rang up $1,500 in his cash register-not for Joe Madden but for New York City's needy kids...
...Madden's "poor party" is a New York institution. So is Joe Madden. Born Joseph Augustin Penzo, son of an Italian baker "who was O.K. except all his life he never possessed change of a quarter," Joe grew up on Manhattan's tough West Side. When he was in the fourth grade, he hit his teacher "on the francis" with an eraser because she laughed at the way he spelled Philadelphia. When the truant officers found him, ten days later, he was sent to reform school. There he met an Irish kid named Frankie Madden, leader...
...Madden might still have been a stumblebum had he not won 200 "clams" shooting craps one night in a waterfront dive. Determined "to quit being a uncouth bum," he bought a case of whiskey and a second-hand cash register, opened a speakeasy in Manhattan's famed Fifties. One night, after some of his customers had got into a skull-cracking brawl that brought the cops swarming in. Barkeep Madden, plenty irate, took his pencil from behind his ear. poured out a piece of his mind, pasted it on the mirror behind his bar: "Just for your information...
Among his customers the following day were a couple of Yale students. Amused, they copied Madden's scrawly rebuke, showed it to their friends. Madden became a "character." His joint was on the map for Yalemen, Park Avenue debs, Long Island's polo crowd. Encouraged by his customers, Joe began to write weekly essays-hard-earned wisdom couched in his own lingo. He had his pieces punctuated by a race-track handicapper with a high-school education, mailed them to his clientele. In ivy-clad Eastern dormitories, Madden's essays had a wider circulation than those...
...Roosevelt looked around on behalf of disappointed Mr. Madden, found a $12,500 judgeship in the U. S. Court of Claims, and kicked him upstairs into...