Word: dirt-poor
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...Caro details, Johnson had decided early on that a dirt-poor boy from Texas could be somebody. After winning a congressional seat of his own in 1937, he was certain that he could go all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Yet for all that unbridled ambition, he proved a lackluster Representative. He made few speeches, introduced no legislation of note and would not fight for the passage of anyone else's. Stymied by the seniority system and generally despised by congressional colleagues, he hit upon a way to gain eminence: those cashstuffed envelopes. Caro says that Johnson took...
Students in dirt-poor Hancock County, Ga., have always had to make do with less. They have no art teachers, no speech therapists and no full-time physical education program in the elementary schools...
...Friday John Paul was acting as if the attack had never occurred. Visiting the agricultural community of Vila Viçosa 90 miles east of Lisbon, in a stronghold of grass-roots Communism where dirt-poor farm laborers seized estates in the wake of the 1974 revolution, the Pontiff issued a rousing call for "fundamental human rights" and better living conditions for rural workers. Afterward, he stepped out into the crowd, pushing through a tight police cordon to shake hands. At one point he beckoned to a cluster of men and women wearing broad-brimmed straw hats and blankets draped...
...guess I've grown up with flying in my family," he says "I've been flying since before I was even born." His mother once worked as a stewardess, and his father flew passenger planes for Delta until he died two years ago. "He was a dirt-poor Tennessee bum," Russell says proudly, "He taught me a lot more than just flying...
...Dirt-poor Djibouti is a New Hampshire-sized chunk of harsh, heat-seared desert and mountains populated by roughly 220,000 people, mostly impoverished nomads whose average cash income is less than $50 a year. Djibouti comes to independence, after 115 years of French rule, with only three college graduates, no industry other than a pair of soft-drink plants, no agriculture whatever and an export trade restricted to hides and skins (goats outnumber people by better than 2 to 1). "If it were anywhere else," says an Arab diplomat in Djibouti town (pop. 140,000), "nobody would care about...