Word: 1880s
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...literary ventriloquism. Like Tom Sawyer, Davey Burnie is an orphan with a pesky aunt who keeps scrubbing out his ears. Like Huck, Davey has a Negro pal, name of Commercial Appeal. Unfortunately. Commercial Appeal is killed in an early burst of Ku Klux Klan violence in Kentucky in the 1880s and cannot sail down the Mississippi with Davey. But down the Mississippi Davey does go, with his Uncle Jim, a cigar-smoking Civil War veteran and college man learned in the classic lore of "a number of deceased nuisances like Horace and Socrates and Pluto." Other passengers...
...here (J. C. Squire is one). Macdonald was uplifted by his rediscovery of The Stuffed Owl (title taken from a wonderfully woeful Wordsworth poem of the same name), an Anthology of Bad Verse published in 1930. He was dispirited by the six-volume collection of parody published in the 1880s, which contained 86 versions of Gray's Elegy, 60 versions of Poe's The Raven, and 21 of The Charge of the Light Brigade. He has learned that the greatest are beyond parody: Shakespeare was himself a master parodist (of Nashe, Marlowe, Lyly), but no one ever capped...
...Synagogue could not have found a man more fitted for the commission, for though Rattner is not an orthodox believer, his Jewish heritage and faith are often the fire behind his art. Born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., the son of a moneyless baker who had fled from Russia in the 1880s, young Rattner gathered bits of coal along the railroad tracks to heat his parents' home, took whatever odd jobs came along. But what he remembers most vividly about the Poughkeepsie of his youth was the penalty of being Jewish. Only after a kindhearted Irish cop got him boxing lessons...
...Modest Improvement. Barker had been lured by Africa since his childhood donations to church missionary work. He met his wife Margaret at medical school, and they left for Zululand together in 1945. Their assignment was St. Augustine's station, founded in the 1880s by an archdeacon who had earned local fame as a healer with one modest improvement on witch doctors' methods: he routed out decayed teeth with pliers instead of a spear or rusty nail. The hospital was 40 miles from the nearest railway; when the Barkers took over, it was an iron-roofed bungalow compound inhabited...
...Boom. Foreshadowed by Leonardo da Vinci in 1508, contact lenses were first made in Europe in the 1880s. They were big, covering most of the sclera (the white of the eye), heavy (made of glass), hard to fit and forbiddingly expensive. Early plastic lenses were also of the big scleral type, had to float on a bath of special wetting fluid, and could be worn only four to five hours at a stretch. Then came the methyl-methacrylate plastics (of the Plexiglas family), the discovery that fluid was unnecessary if lenses had a hole to permit tears to pass beneath...