Word: racketeering
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week a racket of incredible proportions came to light in Chicago, where slickers used to bilk hayseeds by promising to let them see the Masonic Temple revolve on its invisible axis. Scene was the U. S. District Court, Judge Philip L. Sullivan presiding. Cast consisted principally of 41 defendants on trial for using the mails to swindle an estimated $1,350,000 from some 70,000 Midwesterners. The fantastic fraud on view was based on the assumption that Sir Francis Drake had left a huge and as yet undivided fortune. Some 27 billion dollars would be split as soon...
...centuries the Drake racket has flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 1880's Robert Todd Lincoln, U. S. Minister to the Court of St. James's, officially warned his fellow countrymen that "shares" in the fortune of the celebrated British seaman were nonexistent. Three years ago Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown broke a precedent by making public the names of seven citizens to whom the use of the mails had been denied because they had accepted "donations" from aspirants to the Drake heritage (TIME, Jan. 23, 1933). At that time the Solicitor of the Postoffice...
Thus did good Dr. Townsend brave thick-flying charges that he and National Secretary Clements have turned their great dream into a pious racket...
...Touch of Brimstone (by Leonora Kaghan & Anita Philips; John Golden producer) is a genuine three-dimensional portrait of a complete, ruthless egotist. Mark Faber (Roland Young) got into show business simply to make a fortune. To him the theatre is just one more racket he can beat. In the course of beating it he reduces his office staff to hysteria, seduces his virginal leading lady, cuckolds his deserving brother-in-law, demoralizes his amiable wife (Mary Philips). Faber manages to commit all this emotional mayhem with unbounded arrogance, callousness and a certain amount of charm which is conveyed by witty...
Born in Oakland, Calif. in 1915, son of a laundry wagon driver, Donald Budge began to play tennis at 8, taught by his elder brother Lloyd who sawed off a racket for him to play with, on the dirt courts of a public park. His first tennis costume was a pair of blue overalls and a khaki cowboy hat. Lloyd Budge, who became good enough to be tennis coach at St. Mary's College, beat Brother Donald regularly until 1933. That year the younger Budge, not yet 18, won the California Championship for men. A diffident, stringy, surprisingly agile...