Word: caf
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Tubful for the Dry Day. In a country where moneymaking opportunities knock incessantly at a successful politician's door, Café Filho has conspicuously neglected to get rich. At 55, he has no savings to speak of. no income except his salary.* Instead of moving into the ornate presidential suite in Catete Palace, he continues to live, as he has since 1944, in a middleclass, three-bedroom apartment on Rio's Copacabana Avenue. Three bedrooms are none too many: the President, his wife Jandira and their only son Eduardo, 11, share the place with Jan-dira...
Like many another building in Rio, the apartment house has running water only every other day, so the President of Brazil has to keep his bathtub filled as a reservoir for the dry days. Says Café Filho: "It was a tremendous disappointment for my neighbors when they realized that living under the same roof as the President did not mean they were going to get water every...
...outside eyes, Café Filho is a careful dresser with a preference for dark blue pin-stripe suits, grey ties and white silk shirts. At home he likes to lounge around in pajamas, reading, sipping coffee and chain-smoking strong Brazilian cigarettes (Hollywoods). Younger-looking than most men of his age, he still takes an occasional early-morning dip in the Atlantic surf on Copacabana beach. Despite his extensive reading, he is less educated, less cultured than Vargas was-but he promises to make a better President...
Early in life, Joao Café Filho was exposed to influences that were to set him apart from most of his countrymen. Brazil is a Roman Catholic nation, but Joao's parents were devout members of the flock of the Rev. William Porter, a Presbyterian missionary from the U.S. Cafe Filho was baptized in a Presbyterian chapel,* learned to read and write in the free elementary school maintained by Porter and his wife. Joao's first teachers were Henrietta and Evangeline Green, daughters of the U.S. vice consul in Natal...
While still in his teens, Café Filho began contributing angry, something-must-be-done articles on the plight of the poor to local newspapers. At 22 he started a shoestring paper of his own, O Jornál do Norte. Other papers in northeast Brazil were soon reprinting his fire-eating denunciations of corruption. One day a Natal politician whom he had brickbatted came in and laid a large banknote on his desk; Cafe Filho scornfully touched a match to the bill, used it to light a cigarette. At 27 Café Filho ran for the federal Chamber...