Word: craze
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Housewives are conditioned to clipping coupons with such fatuous replies as "Dear Golden Atlas Co.: Yes, I would be thrilled to improve my mind with your new atlas." Last week suburban housewives around New York City were amused by an imaginative spoof of the coupon-clipping craze spread over full-page ads in 21 suburban dailies and 17 weekly newspapers. Author of the spoof: the unspoofy New York Times, which employed big type to trumpet such messages as WOMEN OF DARIEN, LOOK! Purpose of the ads: to build up suburban circulation by playing lightly on the frustrations of the suburban...
These are isolated feats. The real craze at the moment is hiking against the clock. The fad started a month ago when Royal Marine Pete ("Hopalong") Dagnan, 24, set out to challenge the record of 104 miles paced off in 40½ hr. by a U.S. marine. Hopalong, in service dress and carrying a submachine gun, marched the no miles from Dorset to London, eating buns and sipping rum for fuel, staggered across the Charing Cross finish line in mid-London 36 hr. 27 min. later, gasped: "Tell that to the marines!" The marines were serenely proud of his deed...
...last year's campus craze for stuffing people into telephone booths, the University of Arkansas last week added a saner fad: "hunkerin." It means squatting on the balls of the feet for a long time (hunkers is Scottish for haunches). The fad grew out of a chair shortage in a fraternity house at Arkansas, whose students had watched their Ozark daddies squatting and whittling at crossroads stores. Hunkerers always hunker together, and girl hunkerers are perfectly eligible. Sophisticates hunker flatfooted. Real progressives hunker with elbows inside the knees, though this is difficult while "hunkerin' and hookin' " (squatting...
...also started a craze for the pseudohistorical country-and-western ballads that the industry sometimes refers to as "saga songs." At odd hours of the day or night, 40-year-old Jimmie Driftwood takes up his guitar and plunks them out with the ease of a molting rattler shucking its skin. His most recent inspiration came to him via a radio newscast while he was touring the Ozarks in his air-conditioned Buick one hot day this summer. Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, he heard, would soon be a visitor to the U.S. Jimmie began to sing, his wife Cleda...
...bring some TV films to Perry Como, who as producer of Berle's show was brooding about how to fill Berle's summer air time. Assured of employment until October at a fat U.S. TV salary. Entertainer King might even be able to cash in on the craze for westerns. His two-year-old daughter, as a result of his interest in Indian lore, is named Cheyenne...