Word: flannelled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...talk about promoting an "image of law-abiding Americans," are two intriguing social forces. One, breathing heavily, is a positive lust for respectability. The irony is that the men of the Mafia, for reasons of camouflage, have arrived at the life-style of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. But the double irony is that propriety has now become its own parody. While the children of the league labor to prove how sober, hardworking, puritanical they are, the children of the Mayflower, dressed in a travesty of the 1930s' Italian-gangster wardrobe, are straining twice as hard (from...
...WHICH the spelling bee stings a mole (of electrons) and the girl in the grey flannel suit hears from Radcliffe...
...What kind of a student is Radcliffe looking for? An obvious question with a not-so-obvious answer," explains Introducing Radcliffe. They were not, for example, looking for the girl in the grey flannel suit. They were, apparently, looking for you and me and the girl down the hall, the one who runs a vacuum cleaner every Sunday morning at 6 a. m. In high school the corridors smell of chalk dust, and lunch costs 45c with milk, and who the hell are they looking for? I, you see, knew all the Presidents once, but Margie knew all the Presidents...
...Radcliffe Admissions officers are looking for different kinds of young women.... Radcliffe needs all kinds of people." What did the girl in the grey flannel suit imagine in high school? When you read the pamphlet, what did you see? A violinist, a Merit Scholar or two, a Shakespeare expert? A poet, a biochemist, an aristocrat? Cultured young women, taking tea with the Galbraiths? Hornrimmed girls in dirty trenchcoats dotting the steps of Widener Library? The chocolate, peach and lime the CRIMSON warned of? Or Playboy's poll: "Cliffies are Merit Scholars who are good in bed" (thank God! the best...
That myth was nurtured in postwar fiction like Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and John Marquand's Point of No Return: it was caricatured by such writers as Max Shulman (Rally Round the Flag, Boys!) and Peter De Vries (The Mackerel Plaza), elaborated more darkly in John Cheever's Bullet Park. The stereotype was neither wholly wrong nor wholly accurate. But those who have taken the trouble to look carefully have recognized that suburbia has been steadily changing. Today the demographic realities are radically different from the cliché, a change that...