Word: dickensians
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...pardonably proud of the Dickensian way he had come; he had read David Copper field 101 times. The son of Scotch-Irish immigrants, Weir quit school at 15 to support his widowed mother, worked as a $3-a-week office boy for a Pittsburgh wire company, later said he did "not consider it a handicap for a boy in his teens to have to go to work. Being forced to earn one's living strengthens character, equips for bigger battles." By 1905 Weir was manager of a U.S. Steel Corp. plant; at 30 he bought a wheezing West Virginia...
Rather surprisingly-for nothing can be as dreary as a comic in cold print-these reminiscences turn out to be both engaging and amusing. The book is really three in one. One subtitle might read "Up from Penury," the Dickensian tale of a poor Boston Irish boy who made good; another, "Vaudeville's Final Hour," a nostalgic total recall of the show-business tribe that was "half gypsy and half suitcase"; and the third, "The Fred Allen Joke Book," for gags are sprinkled all over-mostly outrageous gags, gags that used to be known as "forty-men jokes...
...caricatures than I thought you did." In Vicky's gallery, Khrushchev looks like a Charles Addams rendering of a prizefighter; Lord Beaverbrook, empire-building publisher of the Mirror's opposition Daily Express, is a big-mouthed dwarf in crusader's armor; Churchill is a cigar-waving Dickensian comic...
...Stingiest Man in Town (Dec. 23, 9 p.m., NBC) will be Alcoa Hour's first 90-minute musicolorcast. Basil Rathbone as a syncopated Scrooge, plus Singers Vic Damone, Patrice Munsel, Martyn Green, Robert Weede and other un-Dickensian characters...
...Question, the Louis Cowan show with Emcee Hal March, is miles ahead of its competitors both in audience popularity and in the vital area of "human interest." Currently, the show is starring Mabel Morris, an aged (she admits to 75), sassy Dickensian expert who has intelligence, impressive knowledge of her special field, and a fetching voice quaver not unlike that of Ed Wynn. Newspaper reporters last week helped along the show's publicity by revealing that Mabel is on relief in Manhattan and that some $6,000 of her winnings will have to go toward clearing up her indebtedness...