Word: barker
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Alexander Gerschenkron has been appointed the first Walter S. Barker Professor of Economics, Dean Bundy announced yesterday. Gerschenkron, a member of the Faculty since 1948, is an expert on the economy of Soviet Russia...
...same curiosity drove others to try to check Bridey's story in Ireland. To get the Denver Post back on top of the story it had launched, Post Publisher Palmer Hoyt sent Reporter Barker on a three-week prowl through Irish graveyards and libraries. This week, in its Sunday edition, the Post printed Barker's 20,000-word report. He listed many a point that checked out in Bridey's favor-mostly knowledge of expressions, customs and legends, all of which (though Barker die not say so) could have lodged in Mrs. Tighe's subconscious mind...
Bridey & Blarney. But otherwise, Barker's search turned up more blarney than Bridey, even though folklorists, genealogists, historians and language specialists turned themselves inside out to help. Barker found numerous directories and records in which Bridey and several of the characters in her story-lawyers, teachers, a priest-should have been recorded if they had existed. But there was not a trace. Bridey-whose name Barker now spells "Bridie" on the advice of the Irish -had given names of Belfast streets and obscure towns through which she passed on her honeymoon trip and on a journey...
Despite her brogue, Barker learned, Bridey had shamefully mispronounced Irish words (like the name Sean, which she insisted on pronouncing See-an instead of Shawn), and larded her story with American idioms unheard-of in Ireland, e.g., her hair was "real red," she got an "awful spanking...
Though nobody could find a scrap of evidence that she ever lived, Bridey died hard-even with Reporter Barker, who was frankly hoping to prove her real. Barker consoled himself and his readers with the thought that the search was really not over...