Word: boyhoods
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Jaunty little (5 ft. 7 in., 155 Ibs.) Doug McKay, born poor of pioneer Oregon stock, often says of his boyhood that he was 16 before he learned that underwear could be made of something besides flour sacks. Trim (5 ft. 10½, 162 Ibs.) Wisconsin-born Wayne Morse was more sophisticated: his fondest memory of youth is lapping up liberal philosophy "at the feet of the great Robert La Follette Sr." McKay is, and will continue to be, a devout Republican. Morse is a Republican turned Independent turned Democrat. Pitched at each other in the fiercest...
Whatever Ike is and whatever Ike may yet become derives from his boyhood in the Abilene, Kans, of the 1890s. Ike and his brothers were taught to be mindful of their parents and their Bibles ("there was nothing sad about their religion"). The youngsters played tag on the barn roof and dared one another to lean over the edge, fished lazily for catfish in Mud Creek and the Smoky Hill River, fanned imaginary six-shooters in the style of Abilene's old Marshal Wild Bill Hickok, who had journeyed away to his death in Deadwood not 30 years before...
Hard as they might find it to believe in a campaign year, said Ike, he had not come to Iowa to make a political speech but to visit again the Great Plains of his boyhood, "this great central granary of the United States." Rambling on with appropriate corniness, the President harked back to the "peace" theme of the television speech he had made earlier in the week (see below). The plow, he told his overalled, khakied and cottoned audience, is man's "symbol of peace"; in "that wonderful future time when there shall be no war," swords shall...
...When Bob Wagner, as a boy, was hobnobbing with New York's great and near-great, Jack Javits was a skinny-legged Jewish kid on Manhattan's Lower East Side ("In New York State," he says, "that is like being born in a log cabin"). Of his boyhood, Javits recalls that "the most money I ever had was a penny-and that only on a special occasion." His mother, Ida Littman Javits, had been abandoned by her parents in Palestine and forced to start work at the age of six. Illiterate until she was past 50, she helped...
...available members of his family around a crackling fire of pine and birch logs. Now he banters, perhaps, with his granddaughter Sandra (one of John D. Ill's daughters) about her life at Vassar and his life long ago at Old Brown. J.D.R. Jr. might even relate boyhood maxims: "He Who Conquers Self Is the Greatest Victor," or "The Secret of Sensible Living Is Simplicity." Or convey his eternal hope. "I think that in a hundred years," he wrote at school long ago, "it is to be hoped and expected that the people of our country will be wiser...