There were “years of heartbreak,” the songwriter Johnny Marks once recalled of his start in the music business in 1935. He eventually found some modest success collaborating on a No. 1 hit for the Ink Spotsepoch game, “Address Unknown,” and songs made popular by Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller. It was just enough renown for Billboard magazine to briefly note his decision to pause to volunteer for World War II in the spring of 1942, when he enlisted as a U.S. Army private.
house of fun free spins“I was getting a little attention but with the war coming on I had to put it aside,” he told a radio broadcaster decades later. “And then 1949 and ‘Rudy’ came into my life.”
But the move backfired in a way that few supporters expected. Californians in 2021 actually tossed nearly 50 percent more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed in 2014, according to data from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.
His debunked claims about Haitian migrants stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio, helped stir a firestorm over immigration in that community, which has dealt with bomb threats and evacuations after Mr. Trump made his comments.
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was recorded 75 years ago by the country-music singer and movie star Gene Autry, and quickly rocketed off on a flight that’s yet to land. It spent the last week of December 1949 as Billboard’s best-selling pop single and children’s record, and fourth best-selling country and western record; it was that week’s third most-played song on the radio and the fourth among jukeboxes, according to the magazine.
The next year, it was still dominant — this time against more than a dozen competing covers. By 1985, when Marks died at 75, there reportedly were some 500 versions that tallied 150 million records sold. Marks had sold as many as eight million copies of the sheet music and 25 million copies of orchestral and choral arrangements.
ImageSheet music for Marks’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”Credit...St. Nicholas Music Inc.“If I told you today how much money I made on Rudolph,” the songwriter told The Associated Press in 1958, “my kids would be kidnapped tomorrow.”
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