"Take Out" to 1939?

[George Thompson]

As Jonathon Green and Jan Ivarsson have observed, in the first
passage "take Out" = "lead out".

In the second passage, "take-out" aldermen seems to mean "grafters".  A
couple of decades earlier corrupt aldermen were often called "boodle
aldermen", with reference to a particular Boss-Tweed-era political
scandal.

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African
Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.

----- Original Message -----
From: Bapopik at AOL.COM
Date: Monday, October 8, 2001 4:34 pm
Subject: "Take Out" to 1939?

>   Yesterday's New York Times (10-7-2001) cites OED for a 1939
> "take out," as in "We're going to take out Osama bin Laden."
>   Surely OED has better.
>   A quick check of HarpWeek (without looking at the MOA) has:
>
> 1889-10-05, pg. 799:
>   Beaton felt a sudden turn of his rage toward the men whose
> action would now force him to walk five blocks and mount the
> stairs of the Elevated station.  "If you'd take out eight or ten
> of those fellows," he said, ferociously, "and set them up against
> a wall and shoot them, you'd save a great deal of bother."
>
> 1910-05-21, pg. 14:
>   Certainly the plan as operating in Staunton has been a distinct
> financial advantage to the property-owners and taxpayers, even
> though it has proved rough on professional politicians and
> aldermanic "take-out" artists.
>