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An excellent showman, Borrah Minevitch mimes every piece his orchestra plays, hunches his shoulders, wiggles his ears. He made headlines in Manhattan when he gave a Carnegie Hall concert using not only harmonicas but handsaws, elastic bands, Jews' harps, tuned coconuts, sweet potatoes. Later an alarm went out that he had been kidnapped by Corsican sailors off the coast of France. Soon afterward he returned to Manhattan with a beard (see cut, p. 40), gained more publicity when a theatre manager refused to let him appear with it, on the ground that it was unsuited to his act.
*Like Abraham Lincoln, the late President Coolidge used to play the harmonica. Other mouth-organ amateurs: Britain's Edward VIII, John McCormack, Jascha Heifetz, Irving Berlin.