Word: waif
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...picked up and taken to juvenile court where, he remembers, the magistrate told him that while he wasn't a bad boy he might get to be one if he kept playing around Perdido Street at night. Louis was packed off to ihe Colored Waif's Home for Boys, a New Orleans reform school...
Whatever he felt about the place then, he now remembers the Waif's Home with great affection. "I could do just about what I wanted and we ate regular. I feel at home there even now. I might end up there an old man some day, seein' over those boys like Professor Davis did." Best of all for Louis, "Professor" Davis taught him to read music a bit, and play, first the tambourine and drums, then the bugle, finally a battered pawnshop cornet. Unable to keep the small, smooth mouthpiece on his big lips at first, Louis filed...
Mahogany Exodus. Louis was a natural. He could blow clear and true, hitting the notes hard and clean. He never had to squeeze for a high one. But for three years after he got out of the Waif's Home (his mother got "a big white man" to spring him), he was too busy driving a coal wagon to blow a note. Then one night Bunk Johnson didn't turn up, and Louis sat in for him (for $1.25 a night) at Matranga's joint on Perdido Street; even the great Joe ("there...
...from Waif. Louis is from New Orleans where, as he puts it, "jazz and I got bora together" (in 1900). When he was 13 he fired his mother's .38 revolver at a New Year's Eve celebration and was sent to a Negro waifs' home. There he learned to play the cornet, and soon was leading an orphans' band through the streets to raise funds for the orphanage (he still sends his old horns to them). In Storyville, New Orleans' red light district, where he hung out, he learned the tricks...
...millions of U.S. cinemadorers who like their smorgasbord straight, wise Warner Bros, are taking no chances. Certain that Garbo is still best remembered as the East River waif in Anna Christie, they will soon exhibit Viveca in an adaptation of Ships in the River, a novel of the N.Y. waterfront...