Word: backgrounder
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Golden Glint. Like Miss Stein, Alice Toklas came from a Jewish background and moved in a wealthy orbit in San Francisco. She considered a career as a concert pianist. Then, at the age of 30, she first laid eyes on Gertrude Stein in Paris. "She was a golden-brown presence," Alice wrote later, "burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair." Together they soon set up house on the Rue de Fleurus. While Gertrude labored over her hypnotic experiments with words-the most famous being "Rose is a rose is a rose"-Alice...
Tugging open all those empty refrigerators for Westinghouse hardly gave her a meat-and-potatoes background for her new job. Indeed, onetime TV Pitchgirl Betty Furness, 51, was as surprised as anyone when President Johnson appointed her his $26,000-a-year Special Assistant on Consumer Affairs, replacing Mrs. Esther Peterson, who returns to full-time duties as Assistant Secretary of Labor. Betty got interested in politics while doing commercials at national conventions, stumped a bit for L.B.J. in 1964, lately has been recruiting for Project Head Start and VISTA. Becoming the consumer's guardian angel is "going...
...tests also undermined the conviction of American education that better teaching lies in smaller classes. The average class size for 13-year-olds in Japan is 41, compared with 29 in the U.S. Family background was found to be a major influence on test scores, but Japan is so far ahead of the U.S. that even the sons of unskilled workers scored higher than U.S. children whose fathers are college-trained professionals...
...summary of its admissions policy: roughly 15 per cent of every entering class are "really brilliant students who appear to possess sound character and personality"; the rest, given adequate academic ability, are accepted on the basis of an incredible variety of factors ranging from "rural or small-town background" to "concern for the public good...
...obvious reason for their achievements is what they brought to the Peace Corps: greater maturity than most PCV's (they were 28 and 26 respectively when they joined) and the kind of background that would prove most useful in community development. Between them they were able to teach first aid, child care, swimming, carpentry and auto mechanics at the Casa del Obrero of Manta; in their spare time they managed to organize neighborhood cleanup campaigns, fight bubonic plague and build an oven for the local school's hot lunch program...