Word: enigma
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Before last week's game with Oregon State, Stanford in victory was more than a sport-page enigma. It was a statistical flop: fifth in the conference in rushing, fourth in total offensive, seventh in ground defense, second in passing. But Stanford had won eight straight games and it was pounding down the track, headed for the Rose Bowl again. Tyro Taylor, 31, who violates every tradition of the coaching trade by predicting victory for his team before every game, shrugs off the inevitable post-game question with, "Damned if I can explain...
Experiments on the phenomenon, long an enigma, have been going on here for over a year. George Wald, professor of Biology, Ruth H. Hubbard, research fellow in Biology, and Paul K. Brown, reported to the Society last year that they could manufacture synthetic rhodopsin, a red pigment found in the retina which helps translate light waves into the sensation of sight...
...boss in Chicago? The machine professionals wanted a benign-looking, dependable party wheelhorse named Joe Gill. Illinois' Senator Paul Douglas, chief federal patronage dispenser since Scott Lucas' defeat, wanted energetic young County Clerk Richard Daley, who also had the backing of Governor Adlai Stevenson. That equivocating enigma, Chicago's Mayor Martin Kennelly, wanting to get re-elected in April, and needing the old guard's machine support, took a position in between. Result: a compromise, with Gill as interim chairman until the mayoralty election, and Daley as vice chairman. The solution merely postponed the real fight...
...words (studded with four-letter ones) and a sincere belief that the successful operation of the paper is a public trust. He is purposely unknown to most Milwaukeeans. He declines most social invitations, has few friends, fearing that outsiders might try to influence the paper. He is also an enigma to most of his staff, which has long been baffled by the fact that he can, by turn, be boastful, humble, hard as nails and sob-sister soft. Although he spends six months of the year in his Miami home or in the Caribbean aboard his 71 -ft. cruiser...
...most respects, Madeleine is a brilliant job of moviemaking, but a disappointing movie. It succeeds in making the crime a tantalizing enigma-which in itself may leave some cinemagoers feeling cheated-at the cost of making its leading character too enigmatic to invite either sympathy or censure. Madeleine (Ann Todd) seems inadequately drawn, inconsistent and unreal. The story's conflicts grow out of hidebound Victorian conventions, and these are pictured so stiffly, e.g., in the character of Leslie Banks as Madeleine's priggish father, that some of the situations resemble showboat melodrama...