Word: glooming
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...first (outside New York itself) to embalm 6,000 remains in a year. In 50 peppy years of growth, it has dedicated a main mortuary with 20 "reposing rooms" (all named for famous authors) and 13 cheerful branch plants to the uplifting or happy funeral. But last week, gloom, finally came to Pierce Brothers, and moved to Forest Lawn...
Ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau set the style with his gloom-drenched Confessions, it has been widely taken for granted that no autobiography is really honest unless it is unremittingly conscience-stricken. When a poet such as Britain's Stephen Spender prefaces the story of his life with the statement: "I have tried to be as truthful as I can," readers can be pretty sure that the author is going to whip himself naked through the streets at the tail...
Here & there the gloom is pierced by a lively sense of humor that bursts out like a prisoner escaping from a dungeon; occasionally there is evidence of Spender's acute eyes & ears, e.g., his description of antiaircraft fire as "like immense sheets of lead falling slowly through the sky, rattling and uncreasing as they fell." Then the pea-soup fog of shame descends again, and Poet Spender plods sadly on, carrying his backbone like a broken reed...
There was gloom along the dingy staircase leading up over the grocery, and gloom in the drab corridor outside the apartment. But the Philadelphia reporter who climbed the stairs last week to pay a call on William Baird and his family found no gloom inside. Mrs. Baird had put some pork on for dinner. Her sons stood cheerful guard on the preparations as she called out, "Better watch that stuff or it'll burn up." One son, Robert, 20, could not walk, but he was as cheerful as the rest...
...half an hour before the Miracle Youth appeared, assorted assistants built up an atmosphere of gloom and doom. A choir from the local Zion Bible Institute offered a morbid song called "Night and Day." Many of the lines, like "night is so depressing," reminded one of the famous "Gloomy Sunday" which drove scores of Europeans to suicide. After this selection, a former African missionary made ecstatic comments, "If angels can sing as well as that, I'm going to heaven--how about you?" There were shouts of "Yes, Oh Yes Jesus" from the front rows. Then the "Connecticut Songbird...