Word: ballpoints
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After showing a seat pass, reporters going to the courtroom are ushered by helmeted deputies to two successive steel doors, each manned by a deputy, who peers through a wire-glass window. Pockets must be emptied, purses checked. Handkerchiefs are shaken, contact-lens fluid sniffed, ballpoint pen cartridges removed and examined. Everyone is frisked, and then a deputy passes a metal-detecting device over each person. The deputies themselves are scrupulously searched before every session...
...Dash soap man butts into conversations and flings laundry at innocent people. "Louise Hexter," he commands, "start wearing cleaner blouses!" The shaming, the touch of half-suppressed hysteria, is unsettling. Another instance of the absurd involves the flamenco dancer who stomps the living daylights out of a Bic ballpoint pen that has been attached to his heel. Here the effect is different. One remembers all the other similar nonsense the pen that writes under water, the watch that survives a trip on the rudder of an ocean liner and one inevitably begins to speculate in grudging fascination about what they...
...gullible buyer, no sanctuary is safe. Hustlers are now working the office buildings, offering "French" perfume at cut-rate prices ("It was smuggled in, so no duty was paid"); predictably, the bargain scent smells of watered-down cologne. Across the U.S., homes are being flooded with cheap "personalized" ballpoint pens, ostensibly from a charity organization or a disabled veteran. The Post Office recently indicted one Florida operator who was sending out over 2,000,000 such pens, reaping a profit that may have run as high as $900,000 a year...
...that it has. At Newport last week, there were no fewer than three potential challengers waiting at the dock: another Aussie syndicate, a British group, and a French outfit led by Baron Marcel Bich, a millionaire ballpoint-pen manufacturer. Bich already owns one 12-meter yacht, has shares in two others, including Intrepid's trial horse, Constellation, has a fourth on the drawing boards, and is reportedly dickering to buy Intrepid herself. If the baron was discouraged by the odds, he certainly did not show it. "We are ready to issue a challenge for 1970," he said, "as soon...
...Radio Free Europe (the only English-language sources of non-Party-lining news) and an assortment of gifts. Tipping is officially not allowed, and many Russians are insulted by the offer of money. But Intourist guides gratefully accept paperback editions of Hemingway, Faulkner and Salinger, jazz records, makeup, ballpoint pens and chewing...