Word: boyness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...boyhood paradise torn asunder when his father's skills were rendered obsolete by the power loom. The Carnegies had to emigrate to the foul Pittsburgh, Pa., slums when Andrew was 12. Quick-witted, shrewd and resilient, he survived a Dickensian adolescence that included working as a bobbin boy in a textile mill...
...born the same year) and traveled steerage to New York nine years later with his family. Knowing no English, he helped support his family by selling newspapers and with other small jobs. At 15 he bought a telegraph key, learned Morse code and, after being hired as an office boy for the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of America, became a junior operator...
...year Charles Edward Merrill founded the firm we now know as Merrill Lynch & Co., he was 54 years old and had already lived an extraordinarily productive and visible life. A poor boy from the backwaters of Florida, Merrill was forced to leave college by lack of funds. But he schemed his way to Wall Street and made himself wealthy by the time...
Before he was felled by cancer at 65, it is possible to imagine that he was happy. He had at last devised a machine with which he could endlessly tinker. The little boy, envious of the placid small-town life from which he was shut out, had become mayor--no, absolute dictator--of a land where he could impose his ideals on everyone. The restless, hungry young entrepreneur had achieved undreamed-of wealth, power and honor. Asked late in life what he was proudest of, he did not mention smiling children or the promulgation of family values. "The whole damn...
...better personified the vitality of the American Dream in the second half of the 20th century than Sam Walton. A scrappy, sharp-eyed bantam rooster of a boy, Walton grew up in the Depression dust bowl of Oklahoma and Missouri, where he showed early signs of powerful ambition: Eagle Scout at an improbably young age and quarterback of the Missouri state-champion high school football team. He earned money to help his struggling family by throwing newspapers and selling milk from the cow. After graduating from the University of Missouri, he served in the Army during World War II. Then...