Word: bum
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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John Steinbeck respects the underdog, but he melts uncontrollably before a no-good, boozed-up bum. His sentimental eulogies of riffraff began with his first successful book. Tortilla Flat (1935), continued in Cannery Row (1945), and appear again in Sweet Thursday, which is really a return visit to Cannery Row. It reads like stuff that has been salvaged from the wastebasket. All the characters in Sweet Thursday (who live in Monterey, Calif., Steinbeck's home territory) have a lot in common: rotgut whisky in their bellies, leather in their hides, gold in their hearts and bats in their belfries...
...mile to Barn 20. Millionaire Vanderbilt collects another $28,300 in prize money, making it a total of $781,970 to date for the Dancer. The Dancer gets a meal of some oats, bran, carrots and flaxseed, and the usual victory greeting from Lester Murray: "Come on, you big bum, and I'll do you nice...
...matter of an indecent character, tending to incite murder or assassination." As evidence, the indictment quoted a Greenspun column of last January: "Senator Joe McCarthy has to come to a violent end. Huey Long's death will be serene and peaceful compared with the demise of the sadistic bum from Wisconsin. Live by the sword and you die by the sword. Destroy people and they in turn must destroy you. The chances are that McCarthy will be laid to rest at the hands of some poor innocent slob whose reputation and life he has destroyed through his well-established...
Change of Venue. In Raleigh, N.C., arrested for vagrancy, Ohioan John Pa-lenkas explained why he was in town: "All the Southern bums are in Ohio taking the bread out of my mouth, so I [decided to] go on the bum down South...
...biographer Gene Fowler, he was "a bamboo bridge connecting the art of the 1880's with . . . our own time." His short-time employer Douglas Fairbanks Sr. called him "an intelligent spittoon." W. C. Fields, who insisted he understood Sadakichi best, steadfastly referred to him as "a no-good bum...