Word: guested
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...usually gets elsewhere in the world. After all, jobs for long-sheltered Egyptian women have until lately been few and far between, and her $150 a month at the Hilton was three times what she could earn in government work. Besides, there were unexpected fringe benefits: one day a guest who made a point of always sitting at one of Afaf's tables said: "Would you like to come to Kuwait and work?" She did not get the proposal at first until he made it clear-"as a wife." Dr. Yehia Omar Khalid introduced himself, the pair took...
Genial, gentle Eddie Guest was born in England, came to Detroit with his parents in the 1890s, dropped out of high school before graduation, and washed glasses in a drugstore. He landed an office boy's job with the Detroit Free Press, worked his way onto the news staff and became a first-rate police reporter. But life's seamy side was not for Edgar Guest; he asked for a change of assignment and was moved to the exchange desk-where a steady flow of incoming verse inspired him to try a hand himself...
...ordinary literary standards, Guest's verse was mundane doggerel, written in soporific singsong and filled with synthetic back-country colloquialism. Guest's world abounded with wimmen folks, doctor folks, farmer folks and jes' plain folks. He extolled friendship and friends, God and worship, his wife Nellie, his son Bud, his daughter Janet, the virtues of porch sitting, of babies, tablecloths, wood-burning stoves and wooden tubs, sausage, and two kinds of pie (lemon and raisin). To Edgar Guest, death was "God's great slumber grove" or "the golden afterwhile." Samples of his rhyming...
Such verses carried Eddie Guest to fame and wealth. With the Free Press as his home base, Guest at one time saw his verses syndicated in 275 newspapers. He filled 25 books, and some 3,000,000 people bought them, as before they had bought Ella Wheeler Wilcox and James Whitcomb Riley. A Heap o' Livin' ("It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home/A heap o' sun an' shadder, an' ye sometimes have to roam") alone went through 35 printings, sold more than 1,000,000 copies...
...Guest's success confounded him almost as much as it did his critics. As well as anyone else he knew his limitations. "I do the same kind of jingles that James Whitcomb Riley used to write," said Guest. "All he tried to be was sincere." All Eddie Guest was was sincere; reading his verses on TV, he used to weep with the emotions they aroused in him. And perhaps it was because millions of readers recognized sincerity and shared in those emotions that Edgar A. Guest, the newspaperman who wrote verse, was a U.S. phenomenon...