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Meredith Willson
Robert Reiniger Meredith Willson (May 18, 1902 – June 15, 1984) was an American flutist, composer, conductor, musical arranger, bandleader, playwright, and writer. He is perhaps best known for writing the book, music, and lyrics for the 1957 hit Broadway musical ''The Music Man'' and "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" (1951). Willson wrote three other Broadway musicals and composed symphonies and popular songs. He was twice nominated for Academy Awards for film scores. Early life Willson was born in Mason City, Iowa, to Rosalie Reiniger Willson and John David Willson. He had a brother two years his senior, John Cedrick, and a sister 12 years his senior, children's writer Dixie Willson. Willson attended Frank Damrosch's Institute of Musical Art (which later became the Juilliard School) in New York City. He married his high-school sweetheart, Elizabeth "Peggy" Wilson, on August 29, 1920; they were married for 26 years.
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Mason City, Iowa
Mason City is a city and the county seat of Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, United States. The population was 27,338 in the 2020 census, a decline from 29,172 in the 2000 census. The Mason City Micropolitan Statistical Area includes all of Cerro Gordo and Worth counties. It is commonly referred to as the "River City", as the city grew up centered on the Winnebago River. History The region around what would later be first called Shibboleth was a summer home to the Sioux and Winnebago nations. The first settlement that became Shibboleth was established in 1853 at the confluence of the Winnebago River and Calmus Creek. The town had several names: Shibboleth, Masonic Grove, and Masonville until Mason City was adopted in 1855, in honor of a founder's son, Mason Long. In 1854, John McMillin opened the first store, and Dr. Silas Card opened the first medical practice in the area. Lizzie Thompson established the first schoolhouse in a log cabin in 1856. The United States Post Office De ...
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Flute
The flute is a family of classical music instrument in the woodwind group. Like all woodwinds, flutes are aerophones, meaning they make sound by vibrating a column of air. However, unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is a reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening. According to the instrument classification of Hornbostel–Sachs, flutes are categorized as edge-blown aerophones. A musician who plays the flute is called a flautist or flutist. Flutes are the earliest known identifiable musical instruments, as paleolithic examples with hand-bored holes have been found. A number of flutes dating to about 53,000 to 45,000 years ago have been found in the Swabian Jura region of present-day Germany. These flutes demonstrate that a developed musical tradition existed from the earliest period of modern human presence in Europe.. Citation on p. 248. * While the oldest flutes currently known were found in Europe, Asia, too, has ...
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Meredith Willson 1937edited
Meredith is a Welsh Brittonic family name, and is also sometimes used as a girl's or boy's forename. The Welsh form is "Maredudd". People * Meredith (given name) * Meredith (surname) Places Australia * Meredith, Victoria United States * Meredith, Colorado * Lake Meredith (Colorado) * Meredith, Michigan * Meredith, New Hampshire, a New England town ** Meredith (CDP), New Hampshire, the main village in the town * Meredith, New York * Meredith Township, Wake County, North Carolina * Lake Meredith, reservoir formed by a dam on the Canadian River at Sanford, Texas Ships * HMS ''Meredith'' (1763), sloop of the British Royal Navy purchased in 1763 and sold in 1784 * USCS ''Meredith'', survey ship in United States Coast Survey service from 1851 to 1872 * USS ''Meredith'', the name of more than one United States Navy ship * SS ''Meredith Victory'', United States Merchant Marine Victory ship Other * Meredith College, women's liberal arts college located in Raleigh, North Carolina * ...
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The Little Foxes (film)
''The Little Foxes'' is a 1941 American drama film directed by William Wyler. The screenplay by Lillian Hellman is based on her 1939 play ''The Little Foxes''. Hellman's ex-husband Arthur Kober, Dorothy Parker and her husband Alan Campbell contributed additional scenes and dialogue. Plot In 1900, in the cotton country of the deep South, beautiful and brilliant Regina Hubbard Giddens struggles for wealth and freedom within the confines of an early 20th-century society where fathers only considered sons as legal heirs. As a result, thanks to their ruthless tradesman father, her avaricious brothers, Benjamin and Oscar, are independently wealthy, while she is financially dependent upon her sickly husband, Horace, whose severe heart condition has confined him to a sanitarium in Baltimore for several years. When the film begins, the Hubbards are expecting a dinner guest, William Marshall, a prominent businessman from Chicago. Ben and Oscar persuade him to build a cotton mill in th ...
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William Wyler
William Wyler (; born Willi Wyler (); July 1, 1902 – July 27, 1981) was a Swiss-German-American film director and producer who won the Academy Award for Best Director three times, those being for ''Mrs. Miniver'' (1942), ''The Best Years of Our Lives'' (1946), and '' Ben-Hur'' (1959), all of which also won for Best Picture. In total, he holds a record twelve nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director. Born in Alsace, then in Germany, but later part of France, Wyler was a troublemaker in the schools of his youth. He immigrated to United States in 1921, working first for Universal Studios in New York before moving to Los Angeles. By 1925, he was the youngest director at Universal, and in 1929 he directed '' Hell's Heroes'', Universal's first sound production filmed entirely on location. In 1936, he earned his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director for '' Dodsworth'', starring Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton and Mary Astor, "sparking a 20-year run of alm ...
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Academy Award
The Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international film industry. The awards are regarded by many as the most prestigious, significant awards in the entertainment industry worldwide. Given annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), the awards are an international recognition of excellence in cinematic achievements, as assessed by the Academy's voting membership. The various category winners are awarded a copy of a golden statuette as a trophy, officially called the "Academy Award of Merit", although more commonly referred to by its nickname, the "Oscar". The statuette, depicting a knight rendered in the Art Deco style, was originally sculpted by Los Angeles artist George Stanley from a design sketch by art director Cedric Gibbons. The 1st Academy Awards were held in 1929 at a private dinner hosted by Douglas Fairbanks in The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The Academy Awards cerem ...
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The Great Dictator
''The Great Dictator'' is a 1940 American anti-war political satire black comedy film written, directed, produced, scored by, and starring British comedian Charlie Chaplin, following the tradition of many of his other films. Having been the only Hollywood filmmaker to continue to make silent films well into the period of sound films, Chaplin made this his first true sound film. Chaplin's film advanced a stirring condemnation of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, fascism, antisemitism, and the Nazis. At the time of its first release, the United States was still formally at peace with Nazi Germany and neutral during what were the early days of World War II. Chaplin plays both leading roles: a ruthless fascist dictator and a persecuted Jewish barber. ''The Great Dictator'' was popular with audiences, becoming Chaplin's most commercially successful film. Modern critics have praised it as a historically significant film, one of the greatest comedy films ever made and an important wor ...
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Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin Jr. (16 April 188925 December 1977) was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, the Tramp, and is considered one of the film industry's most important figures. His career spanned more than 75 years, from childhood in the Victorian era until a year before his death in 1977, and encompassed both adulation and controversy. Chaplin's childhood in London was one of poverty and hardship. His father was absent and his mother struggled financially — he was sent to a workhouse twice before age nine. When he was 14, his mother was committed to a mental asylum. Chaplin began performing at an early age, touring music halls and later working as a stage actor and comedian. At 19, he was signed to the Fred Karno company, which took him to the United States. He was scouted for the film industry and began appearing in 1914 for Keystone Studios. He soon de ...
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Blue Monday Jamboree
Blue Monday Jamboree is an old-time radio variety program in the United States. It was broadcast initially (beginning January 24, 1927)http://www.theradiohistorian.org/blue_mon_poster.jpg on KFRC in San Francisco, California, then was distributed on the West Coast by the Don Lee Network and was later carried nationwide on CBS. Bill Oates wrote, in his biography of Meredith Willson, that the program was "one of the most popular West Coast originated radio shows in the early 1930s." Format Radio historian John Dunning wrote that the program was "known in the West as 'the daddy of all variety shows.'" ''Blue Monday Jamboree'' "contained music, comedy and a dramatic sketch (a detective story)."Sies, Luther F. (2014). ''Encyclopedia of American Radio, 1920-1960, 2nd Edition''. McFarland & Company, Inc. . P. 78. A contemporary newspaper article (August 27, 1928, in the ''Oakland Tribune'') described a typical broadcast as follows:Light entertainment will be the order of the evening o ...
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KFRC (defunct)
610 KFRC was a radio station in San Francisco, California in the United States, which made its first broadcast on Wednesday, September 24, 1924, from studios in the Hotel Whitcomb, at 1231 Market Street. KFRC originally broadcast with 50 watts on the 270 meter wavelength (equal to about 1110 kHz), then moved to 660 kHz in April 1927. As part of nationwide frequency reallocations on November 11, 1928, KFRC was moved to 610 kHz, where the call letters remained until 2005. In addition, KFRC had a co-owned FM sister station, known as KFRC-FM, which operated on 106.1 MHz in the 1970s, and later began simulcasting on 99.7 MHz in 1991, and its format continued on 99.7 FM for a time even after the AM station was sold. The KFRC call sign was moved to KFRC-FM 106.9 on May 17, 2007. The famous callsign letters were sequentially issued, as was common when KFRC signed on the air in 1924. They did not stand for "Francisco" or "Frisco," nor did they stand for "Known For R ...
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San Francisco, California
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th most populous in the United States, with 815,201 residents as of 2021. It covers a land area of , at the end of the San Francisco Peninsula, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city after New York City, and the fifth most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. Among the 91 U.S. cities proper with over 250,000 residents, San Francisco was ranked first by per capita income (at $160,749) and sixth by aggregate income as of 2021. Colloquial nicknames for San Francisco include ''SF'', ''San Fran'', ''The '', ''Frisco'', and ''Baghdad by the Bay''. San Francisco and the surrounding San Francisco Bay Area are a global center of economic activity and the arts and sciences, spurred ...
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Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini (; ; March 25, 1867January 16, 1957) was an Italian conductor. He was one of the most acclaimed and influential musicians of the late 19th and early 20th century, renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his eidetic memory. He was at various times the music director of La Scala in Milan and the New York Philharmonic. Later in his career he was appointed the first music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra (1937–54), and this led to his becoming a household name (especially in the United States) through his radio and television broadcasts and many recordings of the operatic and symphonic repertoire. Biography Early years Toscanini was born in Parma, Emilia-Romagna, and won a scholarship to the local music conservatory, where he studied the cello. Living conditions at the conservatory were harsh and strict. For example, the menu at the conservatory consisted almost entirely of fish; in his later years, ...
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