Word: bigwig
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...appeal of exclusiveness and its local VIP leaders, e.g., the town bankers. Says a Missouri Mason: "Men just won't go out to see their mailman drone through a meeting." Even members' funerals, once a must for most orders, get scant attendance. Commented one Knights of Pythias bigwig in Birmingham: "The brothers just don't have the whole spirit...
...born and raised in Tuscaloosa, Ala. (pop. then: 9,000), grandson of a Civil War veteran and son of a respected lawyer and Democratic bigwig. At the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, he was awarded so many demerits for drinking, practical joking and all-round roistering that he was expelled, was reinstated only on his father's plea and on probation. This shocked him into hard work and he finally graduated-far, far down the list-in 1921. After an assignment in 1924 to the Navy's first aircraft carrier Langley, he turned to naval aviation. Not long...
...punctuated by Casimir's sky-scanning Delphic queries: "Are the Life-Gods and the Fate-Gods willing?" Hilda is willing, and there is scarcely a dull moment spent with the count as he 1) sees his first roller-skating show wrecked by a storm, 2) witnesses a local bigwig being shot to death by a bordello madam, 3) two-times Hilda with a carnival doxy billed as ''Phazma the Phlame Girl." 4) has his second roller-skating show filched by a double-crossing partner, 5) goes back to the sea with visions of greater roller rinks. Obviously...
Last week bigwig psychiatrists from across the U.S. converged on Ann Arbor to help dedicate a monument to the proposition that more can and must be done for such children: the Children's Psychiatric Unit at the University of Michigan Hospital. Though the six-story, yellow brick building was barely finished, 30-odd children from the ages of six to twelve had been moved in. The unit's capacity: 75. That is sizable for a children's mental hospital, though many thousands of children in the U.S. need psychiatric hospital care...
Like many a latter-day political bigwig, Julius Caesar prepared for greater things to come by serving as a highway commissioner. His job was to take care of the Appian Way, the great road that stretched from Rome to Brindisi on Italy's southern coast. Laid out in 312 B.C. and already famed in Caesar's day, the Via Appia became known, in the centuries that followed, as the Queen of Roads. Many a victorious Roman legion marched homeward in triumph along its stone paving and over its skillfully engineered bridges. Wealthy Romans built their most sumptuous villas...