Word: bronx
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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From Hunter to Sodom. On the first of the book's 565 pages, Hoover is still President, Marjorie is 17, and the Morgenstern family has just made the great social leap from the Bronx Park East to Manhattan's Central Park West. Marjorie is a blue-eyed, brown-haired beauty who can scarcely see past her next prom date. But eagle-eyed Mama Morgenstern is already shopping in the marriage mart...
First, there is a holdover from Bronx days named George Drobes, who intrigues Margie because he has a jalopy named Penelope and his kisses tingle. But to Mama, George is just a snuffling auto mechanic. When the wealthy son of a department-store owner brings Margie home after a horseback-riding spill in Central Park, Mama lights up. But her social grasp exceeds the Morgenstern economic reach, and the new romance fades. Margie doesn't really care. Her destiny, she feels, is to be an actress. She has long since scribbled her stage name on a scrap of paper...
Like.Marjorie, Wouk was born in The Bronx, the son of Abraham Isaac and Esther Levine Wouk. Both parents came from Minsk, Russia. Papa Wouk started washing clothes in a basement, rose to be president of one of New York's largest power laundries. One of Herman's earliest memories is playing hide and seek among the machines. The Wouk family was "restless, like most New Yorkers," and while Herman was still a child, made four moves, from one canyonlike apartment house to another, all within what Wouk calls "that romantic, and much overcriticized borough," The Bronx...
Though he was later to toss a nostalgic valentine to his Bronx boyhood in his novel, City Boy, little Herman got off to a depressing start. He was the neighborhood fat boy, forever guzzling chocolate milkshakes. In street fights, "I was clobbered." But he had two powerful consolations: the Wouk home life and books. As soon as he learned to read, he would sprawl on the floor for hours with a tattered old dictionary, glorying in big words like anthropomorphism...
...that, for her sweet sake, he cannot let his fighter take a dive. Dailey also has a crisis: the star of his outrageously successful TV program, Midnight with Madeline (a part that features some fine burlesque by Dolores Gray), temperamentally revolts against her prospective guest of the evening, a Bronx crackpot whose claim to fame is his model of the Taj Mahal, constructed in 16 years with nothing but chewing-gum wrappers. The three ex-G.I.s are unwittingly shanghaied as substitutes for the crackpot, and from there on, Fair Weather breezes on to a stormy climax-a brawl between...