Word: fetid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
from sea to fetid...
...intolerable betrayal of the public trust. It has profoundly affected us all, even as we move to criticize it, and reduced our spirits to onerous waste. Vietnam, the implicit subject of Arlen's book, has been turned, despite unprecedented "coverage," into a cause (somehow worthy) of America's fetid evangelical toil. The only thing that TV brings to us with immediacy is its own senescent code of ethics...
...People here just don't give a damn," sighs W. T. Westbrook, sanitation director of Bowie County (Texas). He cares, but is clearly no Pied Piper. When he arrived on the fetid scene two years ago, he personally showed community leaders the filth, started keeping count of rat-bite victims and battled city hall for revisions in the sanitation code. All in vain. So he organized his own two-man rat patrol...
...what the crowds had come to witness. Jules Verne had the vision more than a century ago. When Western man finally launched himself into space, he foresaw, it would be from Florida's midsection. Men with less foresight saw only a forbidding stretch of sand, scrub and fetid marshland that was bypassed even during the land boom of the 1920s. In the 1950s, recalls Space Reporter Al Volker of the Miami News, the space program was so hushed up that the only way to find out that a shot had taken place was to have a Cocoa Beach bartender...
Despite this, the seasonal and sporadic nature of the work keeps total income far below the poverty level. Average family income is less than $1,600 a year. There is no job security, and fringe benefits are few. If they are migrants, the workers must frequently live in fetid shacks without light or plumbing (though housing, bad as it is, is frequently free or very cheap.) As a result, many have moved to the cities, where even unskilled labor can find work at decent wages...