Word: caseyed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...four-man bobsled championships of the world to be decided, the tourists were kept on the sidelines. Hell-for-leathers from three nations-France, Switzerland and the U.S. -used oil and emery-paper to make their sleds even slicker and faster. One of the bobbers was 235-lb. Bill Casey, brakeman for one of the U.S. four-man entries. While the two-man championships were being run, Casey lined up with the spectators at perilous Shady Corner, a hairpin curve that has to be taken just right...
High & Soon. As Casey watched, the French sled rumbled into Shady, its steel blades skitting and chattering around the curve. It came so close to cracking up that Casey made a mental resolution to talk to French steersman Louis Saint Calbre. Two weeks before, the Belgian team's sled had catapulted over Shady's 22-ft. wall of ice in a practice run, killing the driver and leading to Belgium's withdrawal. The Frenchman was driving Shady the same way. Said Casey to himself: "I got to go up and tell him how to take...
...Casey didn't get a chance to tell him. Next time down, the French sled careened high up the wall and was jerked down too suddenly: it crashed against the inside wall, and the public-address system blurted, "81, Shady . . . 81, Shady" (Lake Placid code for "send the ambulance"). The Frenchmen were rushed to the hospital for treatment of their injuries...
Through all the hullabaloo moves O'Casey himself, an ex-laborer who burns with a hot, proletarian fire. He is poor as a church mouse and still, at 35, such "innocent gaum" (dumbbell) that when he gets a check for one of his first plays he doesn't know how to go about cashing it. But he is sustained by wonderful dreams and illusions in which he sees Ireland peopled by "golden boys" who wander through lanes "canopied by the sly innocence of the woodbine's dangling stems," while adoring lasses stroke "the faded, maybe bloodstained, cloth...
...innocent gaum O'Casey woke up with a bump to find that most people were clay after all. When his proletarian plays were staged by Dublin's Abbey Theater, many critics hissed maliciously and poets looked nervously the other way. Even pioneers, O'Casey discovered, fear public opinion; even democrats get a kick out of wearing striped pants and top hats; even noble esthetes enjoy walking with one foot in the gutter. Sean was shocked to find that stately, plump Oliver St. John Gogarty surreptitiously read whodunits ; that refined Lady Gregory reveled...