Word: cobblers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Staticmanship is the way to avoid the disastrous final promotion. It is a stratagem summed up by the classic injunction: "Cobbler, stick to your last." Peter himself, author of two serious books on disturbed children, thinks that one way he has avoided rising to final placement himself is by turning down lucrative consulting offers. This is known as Peter's Parry, and he admits that if most people employed it they would be nagged to distraction by their wives. A more practical technique is Creative Incompetence, or "creating the impression that you have already reached your level of incompetence...
...farmer's son who did not have a pair of his own until he was ten, Salvatore Ferragamo made up for that deprivation with an uncommon love of shoes, and insisted that he had been a shoemaker "in some previous existence upon this earth." Ferragamo opened his own cobbler's shop at eleven and migrated three years later to the U.S., where he took anatomy courses at the University of Southern California in an effort to devise ways of making shoes more comfortable. He was, he said, "consumed with anger and compassion for all those who walk...
...virtues. Aided by Karl Boehm's lively and sensitive conducting, Wolfgang gave intimate poignancy to the often-slighted scene in which the knight, Von Stolzing. works out his song for the mastersinger's competition. At the end, Wolfgang toned down the eulogy to German art by the cobbler, Hans Sachs (at which German audiences used to rise reverently to their feet), and closed the opera on Sachs's more characteristic note of skepticism and resignation: "Folly, all is folly...
Practicality comes easily to the son of an immigrant Estonian cobbler. As a child, Shapiro handled so many shoes for the Catholic fathers of St. Viator College that when the Jewish lad went there himself, he knew the faculty members not only by name but by feet. After getting a law degree from the University of Illinois in 1929, he set up practice in Kankakee, joined the Young Democrats, met Kerner, and won election in 1936 as Kankakee state's attorney despite the area's Republican preponderance. He convicted the state public-welfare director for neglect of duty...
...sand." The talk of a husband and wife in bed at night, speaking of their children or their friends, evokes in tone and languor the bedroom conversation familiar to all parents. In the Guerins' home, guests move through "a low varnished hallway where on a mock cobbler's bench their coats and hats huddle like a heap of the uninvited." Houses have windows whose panes are "flecked with oblong bubbles and tinged with lavender." A television screen's "icy brilliance implies a universe of profound cold beyond...