Word: neveral
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...street parades. Armstrong came up from Jane Alley, a squalid, "back-o'-town" lane in what was then the toughest section of uptown Negro New Orleans. His parents were the nearly illiterate grandchildren of slaves, his father a worker in a turpentine factory, his mother a domestic. Never quiet, Jane Alley became a bloody ground on Saturday nights with razors flashing in the darkness and drunken curses ripping through the night. In the morning, police would come by to pick up casualties...
Mahogany Exodus. Louis was a natural. He could blow clear and true, hitting the notes hard and clean. He never had to squeeze for a high one. But for three years after he got out of the Waif's Home (his mother got "a big white man" to spring him), he was too busy driving a coal wagon to blow a note. Then one night Bunk Johnson didn't turn up, and Louis sat in for him (for $1.25 a night) at Matranga's joint on Perdido Street; even the great Joe ("there...
Louis, a modest man, makes no bones about what he owes to Joe Oliver in the Chicago days: "We never had to look at each other when we played, both just thinkin' the same thing. And he's the one that stopped me playin' all those variations-what they call bebop today. 'You get yourself a lead [melody] and you stick to it,' Papa Joe told me. And I always do." It was the kind of jazz that didn't take written arrangements, if a man had "a lead" and could "cut loose from...
...Louis, with a kind of plantation politeness, still calls "Mister" Glaser. Joe Glaser, a tough, smart ex-fight manager, pays Louis' income tax, looks after his insurance, protects him from lawsuits and handles all the financial details of the band, including payment of the other men. Louis has never read his contract, never questioned Glaser's plans for him. Glaser says: "I'm Louis and Louis is me. There's nothing I wouldn't do for him." One thing he has done is to make sure that happy-go-lucky Louis Armstrong will never...
Dangerous Dan. For Plaintiff Daniel ("Dangerous Dan") Gardella, the word from the bench was the best news in a long time. As a wartime outfield fill-in for the New York Giants, Dan Gardella had never done anything to get himself into baseball's hall of fame (though he hit 18 home runs for the Giants in 1945). One of his chief distinctions was off-the-field acrobatics-he could crawl out a hotel window and dangle from the ledge by his fingertips. Three years ago, after a spring training row with the Giants, he stormed off to play...