Word: binghams
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Every unhappy family may be unhappy in its own way, but few families have had their woes so publicly aired as the Binghams of Kentucky. For nearly seven decades, the Bingham clan owned and ran a media plantation that eventually included the Louisville Times and Courier-Journal, a local TV station and two radio stations. Famous in their own state, the Binghams were something less than household names around the country. But then came that chilly January day in 1986 when the 79-year-old patriarch, Barry Bingham Sr., announced that he was selling the business because of incessant bickering...
...seemed at the time. Now Marie Brenner, a seasoned magazine profiler of the privileged, shows just how much we did not know about the Binghams. (Brenner is not the family's only biographer; The Binghams of Louisville, by David Leon Chandler, was published in December, and another book, by New York Times Reporter Alex S. Jones and TIME Associate Editor Susan Tifft, is due next year.) House of Dreams can be read in several ways: as a love story between Barry Bingham Sr. and his wife Mary, as a guide to how not to rear children, as a cautionary tale...
...Bingham saga spans several generations, but Barry Sr. and his wife dominate the pages. Mary, a Southern girl poor in finances but rich in snobbish pretense, met Barry when they were students at Radcliffe and Harvard. She saw in him the perfect Kentucky gentleman who could make her dreams of genteel grandeur come true. "Like Barry," Brenner writes, "she . . . had grown up with the same hard lessons of vanquished pride, the specter of Civil War memorials, geriatric veterans invited for Sunday dinner, and the endless parades of cripples . . . celebrating another battle of the Lost Cause...
Loraine ((sniffing)): Did you do something, Brian Bingham? Owen, can you bring Shanique a tissue? Clifton, push in your chair. Do you want to wash off the tables...
Loraine: Ay Dios mio, Brian Bingham! You bent over and got it on your jeans...