Word: bangkok
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...police made a great show of seizing contraband opium coming across the northern border from China and paid off large government rewards to the informers. But somehow, Pao's cops never arrested any smugglers, and somehow the seized opium had a way of turning up in Bangkok's legal opium dens or in the illegal export market...
...parachute-drop demonstration, U.S. Ambassador John E. Peurifoy and his two sons, Clinton, 14, and Daniel, 9. Then handsome Jack Peurifoy and the boys got into his robin's-egg-blue Ford Thunderbird and headed back to the Thai beach resort of Hua Hin, 85 miles southwest of Bangkok, for lunch. It was a holiday outing, a lark for the boys, and just the occasion for Peurifoy to open up with his prized Thunderbird. He gunned it up to 70 m.p.h. and left his four-jeep police escort behind. They were used...
...Arbenz pressure exploded into revolution last year, Peurifoy, sport-shirted and packing a pistol, maneuvered the rival revolutionary chieftains into an agreement and averted a nasty civil war. As the U.S. saluted the ouster of Guatemala's Communists as a major victory, ambitious Jack Peurifoy was off to Bangkok to succeed "Wild Bill" Donovan as Ambassador to Thailand. There he made fast friends with Premier Phibun Songgram, who himself drives a swift Mercedes...
...instrumentalists. The glued parts of viols and woodwinds regularly came unstuck; humidity snapped the strings of three violas during Beethoven's "Eroica" in Ceylon. The heat could untune a piano half a tone in two hours and rot a dress suit in a matter of days. In Bangkok, with a temperature of 105° onstage and no fans, U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy came backstage to insist that the men take off their white jackets. After that they often played in shirtsleeves, delicately abandoning suspenders in favor of belts. In Manila an enthusiast presented them with sport shirts decorated with...
Personality & Private Life. Married to Mme. La-iad, a prominent feminist and a onetime Senator, Phibun has six grown children, entertains in a sumptuous Bangkok palace. He serves Coca-Cola to guests (a son-in-law is a local Coke concessionaire), and, like Coca-Cola Tycoon James Farley, he has a fondness for green furniture and carpets. Phibun, a devout Buddhist, was born on a Wednesday, and green is the lucky color for Wednesday's children in Thailand. (One of his prewar decrees made dancing compulsory in government offices on Wednesday afternoons.) A canny politician...