Word: grits
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...handsome if you can, witty if you must, but be agreeable even if it kills you." So goes the maxim that often uplifts the front page of the most determinedly bigtime, small-town weekly newspaper in the U.S.: Grit, published in Williamsport, Pa. (pop. 46,000), by a bald, conservative optimist named George Lamade. By being aggressively agreeable, plain-looking, plain-spoken Grit has built up a national circulation of nearly 900,000 in 48 states, this month will celebrate its 75th birthday as the paper "that rings the joy bells of life...
Pealing for all it's worth, tabloid Grit over the years has given a big play to pictures and success stories of persons grittily overcoming handicaps (sample subject: deaf children learning to talk), decorously avoided touchy topics from the Kinsey report to the Confidential trial. Such a dry-cleaned view of the news stems from Publisher Lamade's German-born father, Dietrick, who with two others bought the tiny, two-year-old paper in 1884 for $1,000, and until his death in 1938 exhorted his staff to "avoid showing the wrong side of things or making people...
...contrary...." This statement was no doubt aimed as much at Northern newspaper readers as at the Arkansans who happened to be present. But, meanwhile, its successful reception suggested that the Southerners, or at least a large segment of them, might well respond nationally to honesty and a little grit...
...Plucky Poet. The story of Tsumakichi has the universal appeal of plain grit. During one night of horror in her 17th year, Tsumakichi woke to find a human head rolling past her on the teahouse veranda, saw a samurai sword flash twice toward her own body, leaving her armless. Her berserk adoptive father, the manager of the teahouse, had lopped off the heads of five of the six people sleeping under his roof that night. Primarily a dancer, she painfully mastered a new art. Holding a paintbrush between her teeth, she learned to paint ideograms and to draw designs...
Researchers have been busy with the distinction between pain itself and a sufferer's reaction to it. Why does a Szechwan coolie grit his teeth and stifle his cries when, with no anesthetic, his leg is sawed off, while a Madison Avenue account man leaps out of his grey flannel suit at the first brrr of the drill on a heavily novocained tooth? Does a Chinese feel pain less than an Occidental? Probably not, according to Dr. James D. Hardy, who (with Dr. Harold G. Wolff and Helen Goodell) pioneered in measuring pain on a "dolorimeter" at New York...