Word: olaf
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...just a naughty notion in the head of a waitress named Jenny Swanson (Joan Blondell), who has big gold-digging ideas but not the true killer instinct. Jenny ends up as a sort of middle-aged Shirley Temple, patching up a flock of romantic tatters, curing rich old Olaf Brand's gouty hypochondria with extra blankets and aquavit, reminding him: "Swedes need to sweat." Nearest Jenny ever gets to Paris high life is Manhattan's sotty El Morocco, where she surveys all the bibbing and napery with a waitress's eye, concludes: "I bet this place...
...most colleges it is the football team; at St. Olaf it is the choir. Each year between 200 and 300 of St. Olaf's 1,000-odd muscular youths and placid maidens try out. The few who are picked have something to write home about. St. Olaf's choristers are held to their musical tasks with religious rigor. To be dropped from the choir is the greatest disgrace than can befall a St. Olaf student...
...Olaf's choristers always sing unaccompanied. Their sense of pitch is so accurate that their director, squat, white-haired Dr. Frederick Melius Christiansen, never even peeps a pitch pipe to give them the key. And their singing has the precision and shading of a crack symphony orchestra. Every year they pack up and pile into a chartered bus for at least one big tour. For St. Olaf, these tours earn substantial sums. The grey stone, $140,000 music building that is the pride of St. Olaf s campus was paid for mostly out of the choir's profits...
...made St. Olaf's choir what it is is genial, 68-year-old Dr. Christiansen. The violinist son of a Norwegian blacksmith, Dr. Christiansen came to the U. S. from Larvik, Norway, went to St. Olaf College 26 years ago as head of the music department. Since then he has become the college's most respected figure, and though St. Olaf's youngsters call him "Christy" behind his back, they would never dare address him as anything but Dr. Christiansen...
...Christy" has been a U. S. citizen for the past 50 years, but his broad Norwegian accent, his preferences for rye bread and prim, batwing collars, stamp him unmistakably as an old-worldling. So, perhaps, does the self-effacing devotion to music that makes St. Olaf's lusty youngsters hang on his every word and glance. Critics have often asked him how he manages to get such results with a constantly changing group of college students. Says he, grinning good-naturedly: "Character is what counts. ... If it comes to a choice between character and exceptional voice, I choose character...