Word: gait
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Trip to New Orleans. If Gait was remembered as shy and pleasant by most of his acquaintances, the Hollywood drinking crowd in the area of an apartment he rented and at the St. Francis Hotel, where he also stayed, recall him as an obsessive racial bigot, an abrasive patron who belted screwdrivers, dozed on the bar stool and bickered with anyone around. Everyone at the Rabbit's Foot Club remembers Gait's big dispute. A young woman had the temerity to tell him that Negroes were "good people." This so enraged Gait that he grabbed...
...Began. The first putative name broken out of the FBI was that of Eric Starve Gait. This, it soon became clear, was a pseudonym built up to throw pursuers off the trail. Fingerprints found on the rifle left in the street when the killer fled belong to James Earl Ray, an escaped Missouri convict who has spent prison time for four major crimes, including armed robbery, burglary, forgery of U.S. money orders and car theft. The prints were painstakingly checked against the FBI's bank of 53,000 sets of records on wanted men; it took 13 days...
Although the authorities attempted to maintain the strictest secrecy, some interlocking fragments of the investigation fell into place. One FBI agent allowed that "hundreds" of individuals were being checked. One name that surfaced-apparently because of an FBI slip-was that of Eric Starve Gait, 36, of Birmingham. The FBI put out an advisory to police, requesting that Gait be located though not arrested. When word leaked out in Dade County, the FBI rescinded the request but continued to ask questions at Gait's last known address, a Birmingham rooming house...
Same day in Atlanta, the FBI impounded a white 1966 Mustang bearing Alabama tag number 1-38993 and registered in Gait's name. It had been parked near a public-housing project since the morning after King's assassination. The killer is believed to have escaped in a white Mustang, and the FBI clearly thought that this was the assassin's car. It had been bought in Birmingham for $2,000 cash...
...best. Some twenty seniors planned to start a truck farm in upstate New York in order to obtain an agricultural deferment until they were told by their draft lawyer that they would probably be classified delinquent for "evasion." Others were desperately trying to lose weight, practicing a grotesque pigeontoed gait (deferred on the grounds that anyone who walks with his toes pointing in would not be able to march long distances) or considering the relative merits of lopping off their trigger fingers. It was all pretty far-fetched, but to a significant number of students at Harvard the alternative...