Word: frailness
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...space is a tough neighborhood for frail balloons. Microscopic meteorites punctured Echo's skin, allowing the gas inside to seep out. Sunlight exerted a slight but persistent pressure. Gradually Echo lost its regular shape; flat places and wrinkles appeared on its shiny surface. "She's prune-faced already," says Richard Slater of G. T. Schjeldahl, Northfield, Minn., the company that made the balloon. When Echo turns deliberately about once in eight to ten minutes, flat places sometimes act as mirrors, making the sun's reflection momentarily brighter. Wrinkled places dim the reflection. The radio waves that...
...tide is definitely turning," said the frail old man. "My crackpot idea is becoming the idea that will save America from economic serfdom and will bring happiness and prosperity." The time was 1937, and Dr. Francis E. Townsend was almost right: his Townsend Plan, a Depression-born pension panacea, had caught the fancy of legions of elderly Americans. At flood tide, more than 4,000,000 members in 10,000 Townsend clubs gave the lanky, mesmeric country doctor immense political power, and their contributions, in a river of nickels and dimes, flowed in at the rate...
...Obligations. The quiet man who has done all of this is a 55-year-old bachelor who was born in a lakeside castle in Sweden of a long line of aristocrats and intellectuals. Despite his athleticism (mountain climbing, cycling), slope-shouldered Dag Hammarskjold has a mild and even frail appearance. He converses sedately in four languages (excellent Swedish, English and French, adequate German), and when he sees a listener has got his drift, will often finish up, "and so forth...
Through two previous deferments. Paris' willowy Couturier Yves Saint-Laurent, 24, boy wonder of the House of Dior, has avoided a 27-month draftee hitch in the French army. The deferments made sense of a sort: Saint-Laurent, a frail fellow, is a key figure in France's fashion industry. But last week the army rejected his third request to stay bivouacked in his salon. On Sept. 1 he will report for his physical examination, presumably soon thereafter be dreaming of furloughs instead of furbelows...
...thousands of visitors to the Prado in Madrid have come to know Goya's bumbling old King, his sharp-faced Queen, the sulky heir apparent, and a host of beribboned infantes and infantas, all portrayed with ruthless candor. But one member of the family is rarely seen: the frail Countess of Chinchon (see color), whose portrait hangs in the private collection of her descendant, the Duke of Sueca...