Word: hobo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...soth century writer died an outcast, . reviled as a quisling by his own countrymen. "A more eminent disciple of Nietzsche than any German" in Thomas Mann's judgment, Knut Hamsun was a peasant's son who grew up in Norway's far north, wandered as a hobo through Illinois and the Dakotas of the '80s, and buried himself in a remote corner of Norway to write novels (Growth of the Soil, Pan, Hunger) of great depth and power. Then, old and full of honors, including the 1920 Nobel Prize, Knut Hamsun told his countrymen when...
...persons" millions (perhaps 8,000,000) would find no jobs in an economy which, like the service veterans, had to reconvert to peacetime production. Afraid that federal subsidies would lure idle vets to campus, the University of Chicago's Robert M. Hutchins warned that vets would breed "educational hobo jungles." Sociologist Willard Waller, recalling that World War I Veterans Hitler and Mussolini first recruited veterans, wrote ominously: "Veterans have written many a bloody page of history, and those pages have stood forever as a record of their days of anger...
...fewer than 7,800,000 World War II vets took on-job or school training, 2,200,000 of them in college. There they built no Hutchins "hobo jungles" but Quonset villages whence hard-working married vets set new high standards of academic achievement. "They knew how to move," says a Harvard dean, "and they moved." They more than doubled the number who, by prewar standards, would have been trained for the professions: 168,000 doctors and dentists, 105,000 lawyers, 93,000 social scientists and economists, 238,000 teachers, 440,000 engineers, 112,000 scientists...
Newsmagazine sales rose by 40%, and vendors found they were selling out income tax guides, the Hobo News, and paperbound books from James M. Cain to Stendhal. Subscribers to the Wall Street Journal angrily reported that their copies were being stolen from in front of their office doors. No New Yorkers were more dismayed by the strike than the numbers-game players: the payoff number is currently derived from the total mutuel take at Maryland's Pimlico race course, a figure that conveniently is carried by the daily press...
Jungle Counterpane. In Oakland, Calif., a hobo arrested in the Southern Pacific Railroad yards was carrying an electric blanket in his bindle...