Word: agee
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Hollywood fantasy. In his desire to pander to adolescents, Writer John Kaye has transformed his hero into a Christlike figure: kids grovel at the deejay's feet while rockhating adults hound him literally to his death. The real Freed, a self-destructive man who died at age 43 in 1965, is far more fascinating than Kaye lets...
...dramatic capital out of this crucial aspect of the music's social impact. Freed's susceptibility to payola, which ultimately proved his undoing, is mentioned only in passing and is then blithely excused. Kaye chooses to dwell instead on a tired subplot about a starry-eyed teen-age songwriter (Laraine Newman, of NBC's Saturday Night Live) who feuds with her disapproving folks...
...previous incarnation, David Weltha says, he may have been an 11th century monk. In another, he may have been an Indian boy who died in 1825 at age nine. Weltha also claims that he can occasionally discern auras around people, and he wholeheartedly believes in astrology, E.S.P. and other psychic manifestations. Such beliefs might seem suitable for a guru holding forth in the Himalayas. But should they be taught in a class by a tenured faculty member at a major state university? That is the question that is stirring the campus of Iowa
...Alexander Leaf, Harvard professor of clinical medicine, whose 1973 National Geographic article and 1975 book Youth in Old Age did much to advance the legend of Vilcabamba's oldsters, ruefully said that it was apparently all a hoax. Vilcabamba ("Sacred Valley" in the Inca tongue), it now appears, has no more senior citizens per capita than other Andean towns. In fact, the revelations of such gerontological high jinks are remarkably similar to earlier reports from Soviet scientists that some of their old folks may not be as ancient as they claim...
Leaf explained that his suspicions were aroused when a man who had given his age as 121 when he interviewed him in 1970 claimed to be 132 only four years later. Leafs doubts were subsequently confirmed by two more scientists. Studying baptismal and other records, University of Wisconsin Medical Physicist Richard Mazess and University of Massachusetts Anthropologist Sylvia Forman concluded that some of the local Methuselahs had lied about their ages and that previous researchers were all too eager to accept their claims. In fact, say Mazess and Forman, there is not a centenarian in the lot-the oldest villager...