Word: bumpkins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...racing public at night in big, new floodlighted tracks, and built up to a major sporting enterprise. Today harness racing is a $430 million-a-year business, the fastest-growing spectator sport in the U.S. With so much money and public interest, it was almost inevitable that the bumpkin sport would catch the eye of big-city racketeers. Last week in New York, as a major harness-racing scandal unfolded, Governor Thomas E. Dewey ordered an investigation of racketeering at the raceways...
...pays so well I can't quit now." Winchell, who does not enjoy being addressed as "Paul Mahoney," tries to dominate his dummy by demanding top billing, keeping some of the laughs for himself, and crowding Jerry's act by introducing new characters. A Brooklyn bumpkin named Knucklehead Smiff is now getting a big buildup. But Jerry, a redhaired, eye-rolling twelve-year-old, remains a scene stealer whose small-boy enthusiasms (Winchell reads comic books to keep in style) and good-natured sauciness (but none of Charlie McCarthy's lethal impudence) surmount the reality that...
...Could Be Won. Volume V, which spans the years 1778-83, starts at a low point in American morale. In 1778 food was scarce, the states seldom filled their quotas of money or men, bumpkin generals quarreled obscenely over "honors," and during the spring the militia melted away as farmers went home to plant crops. The only good news was that France had recognized the Colonies as independent and had promised troops, supplies, and a fleet to puncture the British blockade. For the first time, Washington might hope that if he kept his scraggly little army together, the war could...
...corn-belt classic by Lieut. Beale Cormack* is a blend of Joe Miller and mellowdrama, with a cast of hayseedy characters: confidence man Bill Merridew (Metropolitan Opera's Robert Merrill), who is out to fleece Josie, the pretty Oklahoma widow (Dinah Shore), only to be outwitted by bashful bumpkin Aaron (Alan Young). To this staple story the picture adds Technicolor and tunes like Marshmallow Moon (already a jukebox favorite), but subtracts so much from Aaron that he turns out rusty rather than rustic...
...file away such a collection of rusty cliches as the turnabout of the shunned prostitute who finally reveals her heart of gold; Correspondent Crane's scorn at first sight and love at second for the English girl he meets at the mission; and the transformation of the dreamy bumpkin (this time clothed in clerical robes) into a two-fisted fighting man when the battle starts...