Word: toot
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There were many to approve. Just before the Seattle convention Jimmy Petrillo had forbidden NBC, in its broadcast of the launching of the U.S.S. South Dakota (TIME, June 16), to air so much as one toot by the high-school band from Sioux Falls, S. Dak. that played for the occasion. It took appeals from the State's Governor and two Senators, and finally a telephone call from A.F. of L.'s William Green to placate Boss Petrillo...
...front of the orchestra, an irresistible flow of puns, sly glances at his audience to let them know they are in on the horseplay. His slogan, "Yet's dance, chillun, yet's dance," is the signal for his equally rambunctious musicians to don unbecoming hats and wigs, toot their instruments in a spirit of buffoonery. That this form of entertainment would reach the screen was as inevitable as bad weather...
Thousands of years ago, somewhere on the warm seacoasts of the North American continent, an Indian picked up a sea snail's shell, blew a tentative toot. He had a horn. Perhaps he did not catch on at once, but his horn was tuned naturally to a pentatonic (five-note) scale. The Indian and his friends contrived other instruments to thump and tootle with the snail's shell. By the time the Aztec civilization was at its height, and the Spaniards arrived in Mexico, the Indians were playing teponaxtles (wooden cylinders, with tongues inside producing two different notes...
Next came a bigger portent-to Republican ears, a first toot on a 1940 trump of doom for the Democrats. Alvin Vinton ("Honest Vic") Donahey, Democratic Senator from Ohio since 1934, announced his retirement...
...blue glare of immense spotlights, to the roar of 15,000 throats, the rousing toot-&-boom of brass bands, Republican doctors worked feverishly over the moribund GOP in Cleveland, June 1936. The patient stirred briefly, collapsed in November. Dreary days followed for the Republican Party. The little flicker of life wavered, almost went out. Yet up-&-down the land plodded one yea-saying, stubborn prophet, preaching Principles, an old-fashioned sermon that was drowned out in the pounding, recurrent crescendos of New Deal swing music...