Word: stools
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Colton, the elderly owner, is carrying on with Mayme Taylor,* the high-wire artiste (redheaded Lee Patrick, villainess of June Moon). His niece (Ruth Easton) has fallen for a cornet player (Alan Bunce) who is suspected of being a stool pigeon for a rival circus. The rascally son of the privilege car's rascally proprietor unexpectedly returns from jail to take up counterfeiting. There are also various subplots which flow back and forth across a stage crowded with amusing, if too finely drawn, circus types-"razorbacks" (laborers), cootch dancers, a harmless dope fiend, a harmless kleptomaniac (funny William Foran...
Having guessed, the hangman picks out the right sized rope, selects a stool of appropriate height, calls in one or more assistants to give the feet of the condemned a downward jerk after the stool has been kicked away...
...tells us that in netting passenger pigeons the trappers would blind the decoy birds or "stool pigeons" by sewing their eyes shut with a fine needle and silk thread. The decoys were then fastened by their feet to the stool, which has a circular piece of board six or eight inches in diameter, fastened to a stick four or five feet long, the opposite end of which was placed in a slot in a stake, thus forming a hinge so that the bird could be raised and lowered by pulling a string running to the fowler's hiding place...
...Shoemaker says: "By raising the bird and dropping it suddenly it Avas made to flutter as it was going down; and the flying birds, seeing it, would begin to circle around, coming nearer and nearer, until they finally lit on the bed around the stool pigeon. Then the net would be sprung. At once there would be a mass of fluttering, struggling pigeons, with heads protruding through the meshes. The fowler and his assistants would rush to the massacre, which was the crushing of the head of each individual bird between the thumb and forefinger...
...witness was a onetime stool pigeon of the police vice squad-a loose-lipped little South American called Chile Mapocha Acuna La-tore, onetime waiter at Washington's Congressional Country Club. Lounging in the witness chair, this individual made a series of rank revelations about his services to the police department.* Informer Latore said he had participated in several hundred "frame-up" and "shake-down" arrests of women. The method: he would seek out and compromise a woman, wait for the police to arrive. If she were willing to bribe the officers, Latore got a split...