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Alexander's Ragtime Band

1928


It Happened in 1928 . . .

song The Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals reported that high school and college students were drinking at parties, dances, hotels and in parked cars . . . In Lansing, Michigan, Etta Mae Miller drew a life term as a "habitual criminal" upon her fourth conviction for selling whiskey . . . The Bar Association of the City of New York resolved that "The Eighteenth Amendment is inconsistent with the spirit and purpose of the Constitution and in derogation of the liberties of the citizens . . . as guaranteed by the first ten amendments thereto" . . . A Treasury Department report showed that between 1920 and 1928 the Government had fired 706 Prohibition agents and prosecuted 257 others for taking 273 bribes.   Elmer L. Irey, Chief T-Man, termed the snooper band a "most extraordinary collection of political hacks, hangers-on and passing highwaymen" . . . In New York, Captain Daniel Chapin lined up the agents on his staff and ordered them to extend their hands.   "Now," he said, "every one of you sons of bitches toscanini with a diamond ring is fired" . . . The Drys said the people were buying more and more washing machines now that they weren't spending all their money on booze . . . The bootleg cup-that-cheers killed 1,565 Americans during the year.

William S. Paley, son of a prosperous cigar maker, bought sixteen radio stations for $400,000.   It was the start of the Columbia Broadcasting System . . . The New York Philharmonic and New York Symphony merged and made Arturo Toscanini its permanent conductor . . . The Supreme Court ruled that wiretapping was legal . . . Commander Richard E. Byrd set sail from Hoboken, New Jersey, on his voyage to the unknown world of the Antarctic . . . Socialist Norman Thomas made the first of his six bids for the White House . . . Gambler Arnold Rothstein was shot to death in Manhattan's Park Central Hotel . . . John Henry Mears flew around the world in twenty-threenorman thomas days, fifteen hours and twenty-one minutes . . . Just for larks, four Philadelphia society women played eight hands of bridge in a plane flying
over the Quaker city . . . Five working women poisoned by radium in a New Jersey factory won awards of $10,000 each, plus medical costs, counsel fees and $600-a-year pensions . . . Calvin Coolidge fished all summer in Wisconsin.   In an article for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch he said the nation needed a summer White House, preferably in the nearby hills, so that the President could escape Washington's heat . . . The Methodist Episcopal Church's Board of Bishops listed drunkenness, abuse and lack of morals as equivalent to adultery . . . Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York, disturbed by disclosures of graft in the Street Cleaning Department, called in all bureau heads and told them to root out the dishonest or quit . . .

mae west The textile strike in Gastonia, N.C., produced much violence . . . The Briand-Kellogg pact, outlawing war, was signed at Paris . . . The Pierce Arrow sold for $2,900 and up . . . The shortstop on the Ruth-Gehrig Yankee team was a kid named Leo Durocher . . . Governor May O. Gardner of North Carolina blamed dieting women for the drop in farm prices . . . New York police closed another Mae West show, Pleasure Man . . . Bernarr Macfadden warned the male population:   "If you are looking for future happiness, avoid the girls who wear high heels."   Devitalizing, Macfadden said.   Not the girls, the heels . . . Sophia Tucker introduced a new song at the Palace:   "I'm the Last of the Red Hot Mamas."
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wilder Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey led the fiction best-sellers . . . It would win the 1928 Pulitzer Prize.   Hugh Walpole (Wintersmoon), S.S. Van Dine (The Greene Murder Case) and Vina Delmar (Bad Girl) made the list.   Andre Maurois' Disraeli topped the non-fiction books, along with Katherine Mayo's Mother India, Aloysius Horn and Ethlreda Lewis' Trader Horn, Emil Ludwig's Napoleon and Charles A. Lindbergh's We.   Mr. Shaw was represented by steamboat willieThe Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.

On the stage, Lee Tracy and Osgood Perkins starred in Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht's The Front Page, Katherine Cornell and Franchot Tone in The Age of Innocence, and Eva Le Galienne and Nazimova in The Cherry Orchard, Fay Bainter in She Stoops to Conquer, Laurette Taylor in The Furies and Jack Dempsey and Estelle Taylor in The Big Fight.   The big musical was Making Whoopee with Eddie Cantor, and the title song swept the nation.   On the screen, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse made his talking debut.   So did Mickey Rooney.


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