Word: backgrounds
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Waterbury, Conn. After the guards were set, plainclothesmen walked up the steps and pounded loudly on the front door. The downstairs lights winked on, and stocky, smiling, pajama-clad George Metesky, a 54-year-old bachelor, answered the knock. His two elderly spinster sisters watched warily in the background. George never lost his polite grin. "I think.'' he said after a few preliminary questions and answers. "I know why you fellows are here. You think I'm the Mad Bomber...
...dullard through. Furthermore, the top private colleges have become increasingly less parochial in their search for students. Though swamped by applications, they still send out recruiters to schools all over the U.S. They want not only a bright student body, but a broad one; and wealth and background are less and less a factor. In 1910 only 10% of the men who applied for Harvard asked for scholarship aid; now 50% do. In 1947 the ratio of private-to public-school graduates at Yale was three to two; today it is the reverse...
...then whisked away to a state prison, where he was held incommunicado for more than a week-during which state officers obtained two confessions that later provided the basis for his conviction. Although the lawyers were unable to prove physical brutality, they declared that the prisoner's mental background-three psychiatrists had attested to the fact that Fikes was schizophrenic, or, as his mother had put it at the trial, "thick-headed"-made him highly susceptible to psychological coercion, which the state had undoubtedly used in getting him to confess in violation of his rights under the 14th Amendment...
Against this background, the antics of Premier Janos Kadar were more and more like those of a terrified court jester in the retinue of Genghis Khan. Banqueting with stony-eyed Chou En-lai last week. Kadar drooled praise of Red China and joked self-derisively about pictures of half-naked dancers in his own party press...
...that has brought so much interesting abnormality into the village and has undergone what is described as "plenty of maturing experience lately." But the general conclusion is that the Staces have been much luckier than most families because (as an old friend says): "Tragedy is by far the best background, and every one behaves well in it; it is so worth while.'' Brothers and Sisters is similarly worth while, and those who argue that it is not as tragic as Oedipus Rex will be the first to agree that it is much funnier...