Word: doormen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...violent temper tantrums. It is a dull day in the grimy, ill-lit building near the Place de la Bourse when only four or five storms blow out of the tiny office where tiny (5 ft. 2 in.) Editor in Chief Pierre Lazareff sits, guarded by two doormen and five secretaries...
...Communist ruling clique. The other was lantern-jawed, indomitable Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, leader of the anti-Communist Polish Peasant Party who, of all Polish public figures today, enjoys perhaps the highest popularity and the lowest life-expectancy. The two neighbors, though they shared the same Tommy-gun-toting doormen, the same postman and the same erratic central heating, were not on speaking terms. They were engaged in an implacable battle leading up to a grave finale: Poland's long-delayed national elections, now scheduled...
After sunset, tens of thousands of New Yorkers and visitors to the big city feel a lemming-like urge to go nightclubbing. The way is usually beset by obstacles and hazards: doormen dressed like admirals, headwaiters with manners like Gestapo agents, blonde Mata Haris of the checkroom, silk ropes, and other frustrated pilgrims awaiting admission. But the lemmings are not discouraged; they bribe, push and plead for the privilege of paying $8 to $125 a couple for dining, drinking blended rye at saucer-sized tables, breathing smoke and carbon monoxide and getting their eardrums clouted by a boogie woogie beat...
...truly an era's end. Penniless and wretched, they had come down from Siberia and Manchuria. In what was then the French Concession and International Settlement they had set up a bit of old Russia, full of hate for the new Russia. Blue-blooded officers became janitors and doormen, ex-millionaires turned waiters, titled ladies opened delicatessens, hairdressing salons and apparel shops like Avenue Joffre's "Madame Fanny Corsets...
First came the White Russians, who as taxi drivers, doormen or waiters could not forget that they had once been gentlefolk. Next came the people who had laughed loudest at the White Russians, the fugitives from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Then in a swamping human surf came the fugitives from Spain. Czechoslovakia, the Low Countries, France. All of them bore, like a leper's bell, the one ineffaceable possession left them by their ordeal-the mood of quiet desperation, quiet, because its very existence threatened the peace of mind of those who still felt secure; quiet, because...