Word: hapless
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week, tricked out in a yellow and pink garden dress, picture hat and orange and magenta feather boa, Puerto Rico pursued a hapless, grinning amateur into the wings. Then he laid his pistol down. Out onto the stage stepped one of the most famed alumnae of the Apollo amateur hour: bosomy, nimble-voiced Ella Fitzgerald...
Eleven years ago, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath carried the hapless Joad family westward on highway 66 to a life of debased poverty on California's big, corporate-owned farms. Since then the story of the impoverished migrant worker in the rich San Joaquin Valley had been told with seasonal regularity in fiction and fact. And sometimes the two got badly mixed, as a congressional subcommittee on education and labor reported scathingly last week...
...Political Zombie. Sitting in his back row seat, scribbling notes furiously, hapless Hubert Humphrey tried vainly to get the floor. But Byrd's old friends of both parties jumped in to help cut the freshman down to size. "I know of no more valuable committee that has functioned in this body since I have been a member," declared Georgia's veteran Walter George. "Amazing and reckless charges," said Mississippi's John Stennis. Michigan's Republican Homer Ferguson pointed out that Byrd's committee was so respected by the G.O.P. that Byrd had been allowed...