Word: oom
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Music is everywhere. Cajun zydeco and cool blues vie with big bands and hot jazz. There are marching bands and washboard scratchers, as well as beer hall oom-pah-pah and big-name oomph. Concert performers will run the scale from Willie Nelson and Linda Ronstadt to Itzhak Perlman and Isaac Stern. Naturally, Al Hirt and Pete Fountain will also drop by to blow a few notes on behalf of the local talent...
...great white staircase, and the Olympic wok ignited instantly with a roar. But the highlight for some was the final duty of Lake Placid, the hosts of 1980, represented by Mayor Robert Peacock and the Norwood, N.Y., fire-department band. Appearing incomplete without a Dalmatian trotting alongside, the firemen oom-pah-pahed along the Bosnian Main Street, performing When the Saints Go Marching In, America the Beautiful and Baby Face...
...Calvinists sets out for Cape Town. The tiny white minority see themselves as a new chosen people, driven by religious fervor and economic distress. By the 19th century their descendants have become as rooted, as various and as melodramatic as the land. Villet brings them all onstage: the Falstaffian "Oom Paul" Kruger, grandfather to 120, opponent of natives on one hand and Victorian imperialists on the other; Schalk van Niekerk, owner of a "blinklippie," a stone that turns out to be the 83-carat Star of Africa diamond; the Struben brothers, who strike one of the world's richest...
...family tree through the male line, Hattingh chose five early 18th century native women and traced their descendants. What he uncovered were some rather surprising branches. Among the descendants of an African woman called Lijsbeth, for instance, were the President of the Transvaal republic in the Boer War, "Oom (Uncle) Paul" Kruger, and South Africa's first Prime Minister, Louis Botha. In all, Hattingh counted 80 families of mixed racial roots, a substantial slice of the white Afrikaner establishment...
...high school in Jefferson City, Mo., Wilson knew he wanted to sell airplanes. Even then, he had the knack for dramatizing issues. He once led a strike by high school students to get a new playground. As the school board was deliberating its decision, Wilson had the school band oom-pah-pah-ing under its windows. He got the playground. He graduated in 1943 with a degree in aeronautical engineering from Iowa State University, where he was captain of the swimming team and a champion at high jinks. On the way home from a meet, he picked up a lady...