Some of these have offices in telephone booths and some of them only in their hats. For a commission they will try to sell anything to anybody. They watch the cheap saloons for a "disappointment"--which means that an act has fallen out temporarily or permanently because of delirium tremens, dismissal or death; they try to induce other saloons, without entertainers, to try some--find small, off-key dens and seek to sell them a singer or a sister act. The amount of aggressiveness and persistence they put into their misspent endeavors would probably get them a good income anywhere else--but they would be out of "show business," and they never will be. Tin Pan Alley has its own glossary. All songs are "numbers." Love songs, mother songs, anything romantic, are "ballads"--a remote adaptation of the original word. All songs of regret and revenge and love's bitter grief are "torches." All crazy songs, which make no sense, are "freaks." All crazy songs which make some sense are "novelties." War songs are "flag wavers." All songs about the south are "Dixies." The overnight possibilities of radio and millions of juke-box and parlor records have revolutionized the arts and wiles and guiles of "plugging," which is too bad in some ways, though the members of the craft were generally about as venal vultures as the morasses of Manhattan have disgorged. Their vocation gave them license to knock on dressing-room doors, and many pressed their advantage beyond the call of duty. They had expense accounts, some professional standing and a fund of that gutter shrewdness and knowledge which are perilous possessions of the unprincipled, yet licensed, scavengers who infest the outer rims of a world which holds forth a few miraculous rewards and an untold number of sordid soul-searings to young, impressionable, overoptimistic girls who reach so desperately for that one chance in a million. Such girls are exposed to contacts in getting costumes, make-up, dancing shoes, printed "notices," their very jobs. They are hectic, striving, not subject to the reactions and restraints of sheltered, normal living. And it is no attack on the geniuses and executives of the music business to state that the riffraff of its ragtag has a sustained record of abusing the hospitality of a harum-scarum world where shadow and substance have undefined borders. * * * * * Nearby, too, are the home offices of all the giant Hollywood studios. The pavements, which at night echo and re-echo to the tread of millions of heels, are pre-empted all day by cigar-smoking, side-of-mouth-talking, sure-thing artists and wise boys; bookies, promoters, pluggers, gamblers, hangers-on and layers-off. The southeast corner of 50th Street and Seventh Avenue epitomizes the decline of the Stem. Gone is the glamorous Earl Carroll Theatre that once graced the spot.