Word: buchwald
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Three years went by, and Buchwald still did not have either a high school or college degree. But he left USC and went to Paris on the G.I. bill, ostensibly to write the Great American Novel. Now he admits forthrightly, however, "That was just something to tell everybody." Unlike the generation before his, Buchwald said his contemporaries in Paris "never considered ourselves a lost generation because we were getting $75 a month from Uncle Sam. If things ever got rough you could always get a job with the Marshall Plan, "which started up so quickly and needed so many workers...
After a year, though, the authorities caught up with him and reminded Buchwald that he did not possess a high school diploma. But instead of kicking him out of school, they made him a "special student," forbidding him to work for a degree. That was just fine for the young scholar, who told his superiors, "I don't have a high school diploma; there's no sense having a college degree...
...Buchwald failed to become one of the fast-rising young stars in the Marshall Plan, though, and in 1949 he went to the managing editor ot the International Herald Tribune in Paris and told him he wanted to do a nightclub and film column. "He said if they wanted someone to do it, they'd find someone and it wouldn't be me, and he threw me out of the office," Buchwald recalled. Two weeks later, the intrepid would-be columnist heard the managing editor had left town for a while, and he went back to the Tribune...
...paid off. The cigar-chomping humorist is now syndicated in 550 newpapers. Occasionally the USSR's Pravda or Izvestia prints one of Buchwald's columns--they especially like ones critical of the administration. "Every once in a while I get an angry call from the State Department, and they'll say, 'Do you know the Soviets used your column this morning?'" To which Buchwald said he always replies, "Stop them...
Even after more than 25 years of writing a syndicated column three times a week--and tussling occasionally with the State Department--Buchwald said he doesn't think he's become stale. "The most dangerous thing about anything you do for awhile is predictability, and the worst thing you want to happen to you is for the reader to know what you're going to say before they read the column; and that's why I try to mix up my columns so much and I won't necessarily stick with political stuff because people can get tired of that...