Word: ella
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Died. Mildred Ella ("Babe") Didrikson Zaharias, 42, sinewy, square-jawed Texas tomboy who played baseball with a House of David team, barnstormed nationally in basketball, boasted "Ah'm gonna lick you!" and did in 632 out of 634 women's athletic events in her teens, set records (later broken) in the 80-meter hurdles and javelin throw in the 1932 Olympics (where she also tied for first place in the high jump, was dropped to second for her unorthodox style), discovered golf in 1931 and was soon outdriving men ("You've got to loosen your girdle...
Cork Popper. Meet Ella Beecher, 16 years old and unhappy on a western Kansas farm in 1914. Mother is an Old Testament termagant in gingham, a Puritan who never tires of inveighing against sin, fun and sloth, who can drop the appropriate Biblical thunderbolt at the popping of a cork or the inadvertent sign of simple happiness. Daddy, not unnaturally, has taken to popping corks, and brother Joe has married a woman as unlike his mother as the countryside can offer. In rapid succession, the father dies of a stroke after a drinking bout, Joe's lovable wife dies...
...Ella grows up to a joyless marriage to a decent local grocer. She tends store, she raises her nephews, she keeps house and plays bridge when she has to. But her neighbors bore her, the birth of a daughter fails to enrich her unsmiling nature, and neither good times nor bad, drought nor plenty seem to offer any real excuse for living. Author Siebel kills off her characters with adding-machine indifference. Mother goes. Then the favorite nephew dies in World War II. Finally, Ella herself methodically swallows a bottle of sleeping pills, rinses her water glass, and lies down...
Reread Willa. Author Siebel's grim little slice of life has the troubling oppressiveness of a Grant Wood painting. Her portrait has a frame of iron, and within it poor Ella and all the rest do not have a chance because Julia Siebel never meant them to have one. Hatred for the harsh side of farm life is here, and hatred for the narrowness of small-town life, but it comes out as a pathological hatred instead of a meaningful one and Ella Beecher seems not so much tragic as vegetable. The publishers compare this embittered tale with...
...Gentler Sex. In Oshawa, Ont, 27-year-old Cyril Arsenault was sentenced to three months in jail for assault after Nurse Ella Chalmers testified: "He put a headlock on me, and I forced my fingers between his teeth to twist his jaw around. I punched him on the nose and made it bleed. I let him up twice because I won't hit even a man when he's down...