Word: cigar
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Wild Senator William Langer, the committee chairman, was in a cigar-crunching mood. He wanted to know how many business monopolists Berge's Antitrusters had put in jail. "None," said Berge. "I'm wondering if there is any justification for having your department at all under the present management," said Senator Edward J. Thye. When Berge protested that it was not "the policy of the department to seek jail sentences," Langer exploded that "the [antitrust] law has been on the books 57 years come next July and they haven't enforced...
...easy to see and hard to miss. No secretaries shield him, but callers have to compete with clubwomen, clergymen, panhandlers, bankers, ward-heelers-and reporters who sit in the edges of nearby desks, eyes cocked for an opening. The man to see sits in shirtsleeves, chomping a frayed cigar, nodding vigorously, his stomach like a bolster between him and the desk...
...from San Francisco to Paris, but would rather live in his home town, Three Rivers, Mich. (pop. 6,710). Most of Chet's columns are as casual as any street-corner conversation: they concern a funeral, a backyard spat, an old gaffer's boyhood reminiscence, or plain cigar-store gossip. Sometimes he reports technological progress...
...Chet dislikes them just as much. Says he: "Rotary ruins little towns like this. Gives them big-town ideas. Commerce! Progress! Whenever there's progress, somebody loses." Most of his characters come from the pinochle-playing crowd that hangs out in the back room of Rohrer's cigar store-the town jeweler, the justice of the peace, the town's fat man. They have long since learned to make a pretense of ignoring their Boswell, and to continue behaving conscientiously like Chet Shafer characters...
Each morning Shafer climbs to his "city news bureau" in a loft over Wittenberg's newsstand. The floor is littered with years of overflow from his orange-crate "files," the whole scene dominated by a huge stove and a headless, female cigar-store Indian. There Chet pecks out "Doings," a paragraph of gossip for the local Commercial, and "straight stuff" for the Kalamazoo Gazette. Making his rounds, Chet is easy to spot: in winter by his coonskin hat and wolf coat, in summer by a flat fedora which he once had insured against fire, theft and collision...