Word: hardings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Norman Collisson, 47, stocky, go-getting industrial engineer (onetime chief power engineer, American Gas & Electric Co.), was the hard-working chief of ECA's mission to Germany's Bizonia. As a Navy captain, he had a peculiar wartime job: running strikebound plants (York Safe and Lock, some 60 oil refineries) seized by the Navy. Now he was trying to tap Bizonia's vitally needed industry. "Western Europe," he said, "is like a machine that has run way down. Part needs oiling, part replacing, part overhauling. Before this machine can achieve top efficiency again, every single piece must...
...that he was ripping into left, center and right for not seeing things the way Americans do. He antagonized a lot of Italians by telling them that land reform was bad because it would decrease production. This, he said, was just his personal opinion; Italians had a hard time distinguishing between Zellerbach, the person, and Zellerbach, the ECAdministrator...
...attempt to pep up the pocket-sized magazine he took over 15 months ago. In the year and a half before he arrived, Pageant had lost $400,000, and Publisher Alex L. Hillman (who also owns a dozen pulps and comics) was getting ready to shut it down. Intense, hard-working Harris Shevelson, who had moved over from the managing editor's chair at Coronet, zipped up Pageant's articles and covers, put in more pictures. Circulation for March was 350,000, and 400,000 copies were printed for April. Pageant was in the black...
...bestseller ranks. Rivaling it in popularity, though not in caliber, are The Greatest Story Ever Told (Fulton Oursler's rewrite of the New Testament), Lloyd Douglas' The Big Fisherman, and Father James Keller's account of the Christopher movement, You Can Change the World. Some hard-boiled book men are cynical at the suggestion that this betokens a "trend." Said Robert W. Faith of a St. Louis Doubleday bookshop: "Some books on two themes always draw interest . . . those on sex and those on religion...
Doubtless all this might be funny (after all, there was Arsenic and Old Lace). But it isn't. And it is all the less funny because it tries so hard to be. It is crudely and noisily staged, gives up satire for slapstick, proves even more alcoholic than macabre. It owes its few real laughs to what Thomas Mitchell, as the undertaker, does with his facial muscles and his vocal cords...