Word: ticker
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...stock ticker - a machine that tracked financial data over telegraph lines and stamped it on strips called ticker tape for the sound the printing made - had barely been around two decades before Wall Streeters realized that throwing its ribbony paper out the window was a fun way to celebrate. They first did it on Oct. 29, 1886, inspired by the ceremony to dedicate the Statue of Liberty. The practice was still a novelty 10 years later, when the New York Times reported that office workers had "hit on a new and effective scheme of adding to the decorations...
...million people turned out to make Admiral George Dewey, hero of the battle of Manila Bay, the first individual honored with a ticker-tape parade. Former President Teddy Roosevelt got one in 1910 upon returning from his African safari. But it wasn't until 1919, when Grover Whalen was made New York City's official greeter, that ticker-tape parades took off: from 1919 to 1953 he reportedly threw 86 of them, many at the urging of the State Department. The luminaries he feted in his early years included Albert Einstein in 1921 - the only scientist ever honored with...
...those early years, curmudgeons did their best to rain on the parade. A 1904 letter to the editor urged the New York Times to speak out against the "evil" practice, suggesting that parade horses spooked by falling ticker tape might plow into the crowd on the sidewalk and cause "disaster." (A few years later, an overzealous reveler reportedly neglected to tear the pages out of a phone book and instead threw the whole thing out the window; it struck a passerby and knocked him unconscious.) By 1926, New York Stock Exchange officials had grown concerned about the cost of tossing...
...complaints had all but vanished, however, by 1945, when V-J day prompted the most lavish ticker-tape parade in history. Revelers celebrating the Allied victory over Japan filled the air with cloth, feathers, hat trimmings, paper and confetti. On Aug. 14, 1945, 3,000 street sweepers worked through the night to clean it up, only to have their efforts undone when the merriment continued the next morning. All told, merrymakers flung 5,438 tons of material on New York City's streets...
...late 1960s, the stock exchange was upgrading to electronic boards, leaving them little use for ticker tape. The parades dwindled: there was only a handful in the 1970s and 1980s. The 1990s saw a brief resurgence: among the highlights was the 1998 fete honoring John Glenn for becoming the oldest person to go into space, at age 77. Coming 36 years after his first one, it put him in an élite club of multiple-parade honorees, including Amelia Earhart, Dwight Eisenhower and Charles de Gaulle. But there have been only two parades this decade - one for the Yankees fresh...