Word: feckless
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...have tangled with the law sooner or later. (A sixth defendant is still at large.) What made the case fascinating in France was that the five were drawn almost inevitably to the S.A.O. and its paranoiac delusions of glory from similarly abject backgrounds: broken homes, army service in Algeria, feckless drifting from job to job. In the dock they seemed almost a composite of the S.A.O. mentality. The lineup...
...when they married, she a lady's maid in Liverpool. He failed his way through a variety of tiny enterprises, including-for nine of Emlyn's formative years-the operation of a country pub. Dad was at home on either side of a bar, beery, convivial and feckless. Mam was "conventional to the point of defeatism, shy of strangers and painfully conscious of the immorality of spending one penny unless there was a halfpenny behind it." Neither of them was more than barely literate. Welsh was their language; Emlyn hardly heard an English word until...
...Burns's tavern, with its row of convenient cabins out back. His wife Donna is both high-spirited and indecisive, but he settles her down with a tumbling succession of babies. His spinster sister Alma proves more difficult. She falls in love with soft-spoken Roger Larkin, a feckless Southerner who holds the depressed view that the U.S. is a giant pool table and he its eight ball: the Great Pool Player Upstairs puts him now in the side pocket of Louisiana, now in the corner pocket of Texas. While he wanders, Alma sits patiently home, waiting...
Died. Eddie Gaedel, 36, big-league baseball's only midget (3 ft. 7 in.), hired in 1951 by promotion-prone Impresario Bill Veeck, then boss of the fanless, feckless St. Louis Browns; in Chicago. In his one time at bat (against the Detroit Tigers) during his brief playing career, Gaedel drew a walk. A few days later, after Veeck had threatened to use him as a pinch hitter every time the bases were loaded. League President Will Harridge canceled Gaedel's contract "in the best interest of baseball...
...dandies, of course, was George Bryan Brummell. The son of a well-to-do bureaucrat (he confounded criticism of his birth by claiming that "my father was a very superior valet, and kept his place all his life"), Beau Brummell in his teens became the friend of the fat, feckless Prince of Wales. By dressing with unheard-of care and severity-he used only two colors, blue for his coat and buff for his waistcoat and trousers-and by developing a haughty silence that could strike like a thunderclap, Brummell made himself the embodiment of bon ton in London society...