Word: congo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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From the lettuce fields of California to the steaming Congo of Africa may seem an unusual route to professorship of American Literature at Harvard, but for Perry Gilbert eddy Miller, these are just two ordinary contrasts in a most extraordinary career. One-time hobo, actor, and liberator of Paris, Miller is now a genial and unorthodox expert on the puritan orthodoxy in America, a man who follows Ted Williams' batting averages almost as closely as he scrutinizes Jonathan Edwards' theology...
When plagiarizing failed to please, Miller found a job on a tramp freighter headed for the west coast of Africa. He went up the Congo and into the darkness with a heart more interested in adventure than introspection, but after ferrying oil drums up and down for a while, he suddenly realized what he ought to be doing. "I had a vision in the solitude of the Congo," he explains. "The idea of studying American civilization dawned on me, for I saw what America Meant in the world-power. That power needed expounding...
...Whitfield, 30, work meant running and making friends for the U.S. From Iceland to the heart of the Congo, the limber-legged Negro demonstrated the smooth style and strenuous training techniques that have won him two Olympic gold medals (at 800 meters in 1948 and 1952) and helped him set ten middle-distance marks. * Everywhere, he managed to give local runners a quick course of expert coaching, lead them through exhausting calisthenics and still had strength enough to run the legs off the fastest trackmen around. Seldom has the U.S. State Department sponsored so popular an ambassador...
Through Nigeria and the Belgian Congo, north to Egypt, across Pakistan and India to Burma, the tireless ambassador made tens of thousands of friends. Gifts were pressed on him-a leopard skin in India, Olympic laurels in Greece, a chieftain's crown in Nigeria...
Along a mud track in the Belgian Congo, a district officer peacefully cycled on his rounds. All at once he heard shrieks of terror, and a horde of natives plunged past him, screaming a word he had never heard before. "Mikimus!" they cried in horror, "Mikimus!" Drawing his revolver, the officer went forward on foot to investigate. At the entrance to the village he staggered back, as out of the depths of the equatorial forest, 2,000 miles from civilization, came shambling toward him the nightmare figure of a shaggy, gigantic Mickey Mouse...