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In 1930, if you stepped inside Lindy's home Broadway, you might have found a thin man at
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a corner table drinking coffee, one cup after another, and listening harder than he talked.
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Damon Runyon. He was said to drink often forty cups or more a day.
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He sat there gathering stories from gamblers, hustlers, chorus girls,
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and bookmakers who operated just out of the reach of the law.
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He was born Alfred Damon Runyon, October 4, 1880, in Manhattan, Kansas.
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A type-setter once misspelled his last name as Runyon with an O. He kept it.
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After his mother passed away, he grew up in Pueblo, Colorado.
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He left school after the fourth grade and went to work at a newspaper at age 15.
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In 1898, at 17 years old, he enlisted in the Spanish-American War and later served in the Philippines.
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He wrote for army publications there, surrounded by card games, soldiers,
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and the kind of sharp talk he would later capture on paper.
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By the 1910s and 1920s, he became a leading reporter for William Randolph Hearst's New York
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American and later the evening journal. He covered prizefights baseball and crime.
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He spent time around men like Arnold Rothstein, long associated with the Fixed 1919 World
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series. Runyon's writing style became so distinct that it earned its own name, Runyonese.
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He wrote it in present tense. He avoided contractions. He blended polished language with
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street slang. A gun was a rascal, a grenade, a pineapple. His dialogue sounded overheard,
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not invented. Two short stories, the idol of Miss Sarah Brown in 1933 and Blood Pressure
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in 1935 introduced gamblers with soft spots and women with backbone.
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In 1949, producers Saifur and Ernest Martin, they paid $10,000, roughly $120,000 today for the rights.
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They hired Frank Lawsir who had written more than 200 songs for American servicemen during World
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War II to compose both music and lyrics, something still uncommon on Broadway at the time.
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Guys and Dolls opened on November 24th, 1950 at the 46th Street Theater in Manhattan,
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a house with about 1,467 seats. It ran 1,200 performances nearly three years, closing November 28th,
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1953. In 1951, it won five Tony Awards including Best Musical, Best Actor in a Musical for
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Robert Alda, Best featured actress in a musical for Isabel Bigley, Best Director for George S.
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Kaufman and Best Choreography for Michael Kid. In 1990, that same theater was renamed the Richard
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Rogers Theater linking one era of Broadway to the next. And here's something that most people miss.
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Damon Runyon never saw the show. He died of throat cancer December 10th, 1946,
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four years before opening night. His funeral at St. Bartholomew's church in Manhattan drew
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crowds of admirers. Later, his ashes they were scattered over Times Square from an airplane
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piloted by his friend, Eddie Rickenbacher, the World War I flying ace. Broadway had been
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his beat in life. It became his final address in death.
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The floating crap games in the show were based on real operations that moved from basement to
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basement to dodge police raids. The slang, it was real. The risk, it was real. And what the musical
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did was give those men a second act. It let them sing. Runyon wrote about people who lived on
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odds and nerve. Broadway turned that into music. And even now, when dice roll across the
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stage, they still echo the sound of a reporter who listened first.
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These are interesting things with Jay's C.