Word: gruffness
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Boyd joined TIME'S picture department after working for Newsweek for five years. In addition to his picture duties, he eventually took charge of editorial production and a staff of 175 people. Gruff and authoritarian, he was also fair, compassionate, humorous and fiercely loyal to his staff. According to a coworker, "Even those who didn't like him liked him." Boyd paid ceaseless attention to every detail, worked 100-hour weeks and was never sick. If a cold threatened, his procedure was to stay up all night so that it could not catch him unawares...
...looks confounded when I ask if there is much crime in the Zone and simply says "Broadway," with gruff conviction, upping his chin in the right direction. He's pretty voluble on the whole, though, and assures me that this section of town is worth visiting because there is plenty to do here. He likes it almost as much as the open country. There's pleasant country in Ireland--he has seen it three times...
...like tune. While Kogan showed a sensitive ability to vary his tone and style in response to the shifting demands of the music, flutist Laurel Zucker tended toward shrill, unsupported bursts of sound in the high register in trying to create big dramatic events, and cellist Kevin Plunkett, with gruff attacks and a hard-edged tone seemed unwilling to respond to the lyricism of the writing...
Died. James Robertson Justice, 70, doughty, spade-bearded Scottish actor; following a series of strokes; in King's Somborne, England. Gruff-voiced and massive (270 lbs.), Justice appeared in more than 40 films, among them Moby Dick, Les Misérables and The Guns of Navarone. He was best known as the irascible surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt in the British Doctor comedy series of the 1950s...
...accurate ear for Southern cracker dialect ("Chick at awl?" asks a South Carolina gas-station attendant); the jabbering at a sand-lot baseball game ("Chuckerinthereissgahcantit"); and the good-ole-boy humor ("if that woman fell down a well, you could pump ugly for a week"). Best of all, the gruff friendship between Burns and the young son of a teammate is successfully played for both laughs and pathos; as it does in all initiation tales, the moment comes when the boy must measure up-in this case fill the midget's shoes. When it is not taking outlandish swings...