Word: decrepit
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...less than two hours after the polls closed, Bronx Democratic Boss Charles Buckley, 73, walked scowling from a back door of the decrepit office building that houses his headquarters. Two reporters met him with questions. "Get the hell outa the way," snarled a Buckley henchman. Those words were downright kindly compared with Buckley's own profanity. After 30 years as Congressman from New York's 23rd District, during which he rose to the chairmanship of the pork-barreling House Public Works Committee, Buck ley had just been beaten in his party's primary by a political dude...
...week, the rotund, grey-haired man in the rumpled brown suit guarded the decrepit-looking envelope as if it were stuffed with gold. "It's always on my mind," he said, quietly aware that the envelope contained what everyone hoped might prove a musical triumph. An evening or so later, Carlos Chávez, Mexico's top music man and a major composer in any hemisphere, joined some 2,600 concertgoers to hear his Symphony No. 6 performed by the New York Philharmonic and conducted by Leonard Bernstein in its world première. Nearly everyone was disappointed...
...first six weeks after Delyte Wesley Morris took over as president of decrepit Southern Illinois University in 1948, he gained ten pounds on the banquet circuit. Morris' nonstop message: S.I.U. would reverse its own sad state and with it the fortunes of the region-a depressed, despairing, violence-ridden enclave known as Little Egypt (or Egypt, after Cairo, Ill., the southernmost city in the state). "Not one of them had the foggiest thought that anything would come of our efforts," he says-and quietly adds that now "the change has come...
...Presidium was, of course, older: it now averages 62, a fairly advanced age for a group that claims to represent the world's future. (Communist China's Politburo is even more decrepit: its average age is 65.) Former Member of the Secretariat Frol Kozlov, 55, was not on hand; the severe stroke he suffered last spring had dropped him from the front rank. Theoretician Mikhail Suslov, 61, the victim of a kidney or liver ailment late last year, was back at the stand, invigorated, no doubt, by the heady air he had whipped up with his ideological attack...
During his hour-and-a-half speech, with time out for fortifying sips of port, Salazar appeared decrepit but sounded vigorous. Because of a wave of "black racism," he complained, Portugal's "civilizing mission" in Portuguese Guinea, Angola and Mozambique is in jeopardy. Asked Salazar: "Is the language that we teach those people superior to their dialects or not? Does the religion preached by the missionaries surpass fetishism or not? Is not belonging to a nation of civilized expression and world projection better than narrow regionalism without means for defense or progress...