Word: acrobat
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...Gandy Dancer. Just why this should be, Westermann himself is unable to explain. He is an avowed anti-intellectual who insists that he never reads books. At 46, he still likes to stand on his hands with a cigar in his mouth. After all, he was once a professional acrobat-and he likes cigars. The son of a Los Angeles accountant, he took off as a youth for the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest. Since then, he has worked as a carpenter, plasterer and handyman, fought as a Marine in two wars before hitting upon his present trade. Today...
...dropped out of school when I was going to Boston Trade, and I had been training at the time as an acrobat down at the gym, at the BYNCU on Boylston St. I was going to be a mechanic, I was studying automotive engineering over there at Boston Trade and I was going to go to Went-worth and finish up over there. But I was down at the gym one day working out down there, I worked after school at a garage for a while, and I didn't think too much of it.... Just something I wanted...
...paper up, about four or five months, I was brooding, doing a lot of brooding over it. One morning I got up and collapsed, choking to death and they had to call a doctor, he analyzed my ailment as asthma at the time. Here I was a professional acrobat, used to run five-six miles in the morning, keep in condition you know. Asthma, me? Yeah. Nerves, he said. Take it easy and relax. I just walked around in a fog for a year and a half after it, the shock of it, you know, it will affect people that...
...would be upset by jeers from the bleachers. After all, he knew a damnsight more about the art of tightrope walking than anybody else in the world." If Blondin could calmly eat an omelet high above Niagara's roar, Lewis asked, "why should Johnson-the smartest political acrobat of the 1960s-allow himself to be upset by his Viet policy critics...
...Industrial Revolution brought new techniques to toymaking. Machines could now roll metal into thin sheets, punch out forms, and fold them into the shape of toys that could be sold in greater numbers and at cheaper prices; inner works, such as clockwork miniatures, gave charm and humor to acrobat cyclists, gardeners with watering cans, mothers with prams, even mechanical accordionists who swayed as they played...