Word: descent
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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claims direct descent from New England's fiery Preacher Cotton Mather...
What everyone had long known about Cuba was confirmed in detail last week: Fidel Castro has turned his country into an invasion base. The proof came in Manhattan, when a group of disillusioned young Americans of Puerto Rican descent returned home after going to Cuba to participate in the recent invasion of the Dominican Republic. Propelled by dreams of glory, plus promises of hard cash by anti-Trujillo exiles, the young men, ranging in age from 17 to 29 and most of them unemployed, got tickets to Havana and what they thought to be a chance at high adventure. Said...
...candidate or political badge. It was symbolized in the fact that 93.6% of Hawaii's 183,000 registered voters-more than 170,000 of them-had voted in the elections (v. an alltime mainland-U.S. high of 77.4%), and elected to office 42 candidates of Oriental descent. It was a victory for Hawaii itself, and its meaning rent the Pacific skies like an aurora of blazing pinwheels. United in monarchy, nourished in benevolent feudalism, resurgent in the growing pains that shadowed its 59-year-long territorial status, Hawaii now pro claimed itself a dynamic entity-cross-matched...
Hiram Leong Fong, 52, U.S. Senator, who will be the first person of Asian descent to sit in the upper house of Congress. A handsome, greying man, he is an independent Republican and a self-made millionaire whose immigrant father came from Kwangtung province to work in the Oahu cane fields for $12 a month. The seventh of eleven children, Fong decided as a small boy to lift himself out of poverty, worked his way through high school by selling newspapers, shining shoes and caddying, changed his first name from Yau to Hiram to honor a venerable Congregational missionary, Hiram...
...movies, twinkle-toed Hoofer Fred Astaire published his highly informal, do-it-yourself autobiography titled (on Noel Coward's suggestion) Steps in Time (Harper; $4.95). More a theatrical log than a self-portrait, the book brings Astaire from his Omaha boyhood (papa was a brewer of Austrian descent) to the pinnacle of popular dancing, a position he has enjoyed for half his life. Astaire fans will be elated to hear that the end of his career is nowhere in sight. Writes the mellowing top-hatter: "What is this age bit that goes on about actors and athletes, anyway...