Word: gambler
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Larry Austgen, 31, of South Holland, Ill., is a contractor by trade, but a gambler by nature. Two years ago, Austgen built his first speculative house in suburban Chicago's posh Plum Valley: a luxury 2,400-sq.-ft. brick home guaranteed, he thought, to have the buyers lining up. Wrong. By the time it was built in August 1979, soaring mortgage rates and a souring real estate market had made a lemon of Austgen's plum. The house, appraised by realtors at $147,000, sat unsold for more than 18 months. Then Austgen had a sporting proposition...
...Hector Berlioz said, "The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck." Genius, in fact, may be defined as the ability to control luck. A turbulent gambler like Dostoyevsky was not overcome by the hectic fortunes of his experience, but turned them into his art. Outside the genius class, however, there is such a thing as a predisposition to good luck; it might be said on the evidence up to now that Reagan has it, while Ted Kennedy does...
...reclusive man who for years paid himself the spartan salary of $10,000. Yet Juan Terry Trippe, the patriarch of Pan American World Airways, was also quite a gambler. He pushed Pan Am into the jet age and in 1966, foreseeing a market for jumbo planes capable of carrying nearly 500 passengers across a continent or an ocean, sealed a $ 150 million deal for six Boeing 747s with a handshake...
...customized 1965 Mustang complete to the license plate BAD NUZ, and a skier taking off on a jump, above the legend BILL WENT FOR IT. One woman had her stone engraved with four aces over the Christian symbol of the fish. "She might have been a Christian gambler," speculates Quiring. "Lots of times we just...
...full of such bizarre characters. There was the Rodent--one of the most vile and obnoxious creatures ever to crawl the streets of Ithaca. He wore the same football jersey torn at the letters to every class enabling him to examine his bellybutton at leisure. There was Greek the gambler: Captain kirk the pinball wizard: and his roommate Studly the womanizer. There was the Mad Typist who lived down the hall from my dingy basement cell never slept and ingested a dozen No-Doz daily and Howard Machine the visiting professor from Britain who never really caught...