Word: audubons
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Malcolm's murder, almost certainly at the hands of the Black Muslims from whom he had defected, came on a bright Sunday afternoon in full view of 400 Negroes in the Audubon Ballroom, a seedy two-story building on Manhattan's upper Broadway. Characteristically, he had kept his followers waiting for nearly an hour while he lingered over tea and a banana split at a nearby Harlem restaurant...
...Port Wife. His granddaughters, romanticizing Audubon's own embellished accounts, implied that he might have been France's "lost Dauphin"-the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, whom she tried to smuggle out of France just before she died on the guillotine. John Audubon was, in fact, the bastard son of a Breton-born chambermaid, and was sired not at Versailles but in Haiti in 1785. The father was Jean Audubon, a captain of French merchantmen and men-of-war. Though he commanded a corvette in Count de Grasse's fleet at the surrender of Yorktown...
John flunked out of maritime training school, and was bundled off to Pennsylvania to try his hand at business. He proved even more inept than his father. His first investment was in a frontier store in Louisville. On a typical day in the firm's short, unhappy life, Audubon's horse strayed away with a saddlebag full of cash while the proprietor stalked an unfamiliar warbler into the canebrake. Subsequent business ventures in other states and territories also foundered, leaving Audubon briefly in debtor's prison...
Alternately driven and dreaming, irresponsible and ingratiating, mean-spirited and maudlin, Audubon was inevitably misunderstood by contemporaries and, maintains Biographer Alice Ford, "errantly idealized" by her dozen-odd predecessors. As an antidote, Author Ford has presented, in rather stilted fashion, back-to-back facts that usefully clear away the web of fabrication that the Audubon family did their best to spin...
Peddler in Coonskins. The failures convinced Audubon, at 35, that his real vocation was as a painter and naturalist. He started on the 435 drawings that were to become his masterwork, The Birds of America. It was 18 years in the works, and in the meantime he supported himself as a sign painter, debutante's tutor and dancing master. To help feed the two children, his wife Lucy taught school...