Word: hobo
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While riding the rods East in 1922 to work his way through Columbia Law School, the homesick Northwesterner was tempted to turn around and go home when he talked with a mountain-loving hobo in the Chicago freight yards. A quarter-century later, in 1948, Douglas left his judicial robes behind him and took his annual trip to the Cascades. On top of Old Snowy, "the froth of life seemed to blow away." He thought of every nation's "beehives of intrigue," where "the strength of one man becomes the source of insecurity of another" and the "destruction...
...shifting tides of social acceptance were charted in the 1950 edition of Manhattan's Bowery Social Register (also known as The Almanac de Skid Row), blue book of U.S. hoboes. Blue-penciled out this year by Bowery News Editor Harry Baronian: Crown Prince Bozo, for conduct unbecoming a hobo; Frisco John, for abusing people who turned him down for a handout; Buffalo John, for taking a dental bridge from the mouth of a sleeping companion. In this year: Prince Robert de Rohan Courtenay, for inventing a new poetic medium called Pling Plong; Box-Car Betty, ex-hula dancer...
Plight of the Occupation. Most American occupation families live in run-down Quonset communities that look like hobo camps. A few officers are quartered in small concrete houses (built with materials brought in from the U.S., at a cost of $40,000 apiece). The rest of Okinawa's garrison live in hovels. Complained one young officer: "You get tired after a while of nailing the same piece of tin onto your house, watching it blow off in the typhoon, and then nailing it back." It will take an estimated three years of building, and at least $75 million, before...
...Runyon First and Last, a collection of his earliest and last pieces, there are two mildly amusing Broadway stories and over three dozen sketches written between 1907 and 1915 in Runyon's youthful, pre-formula days. One of them, a hobo story called "The Informal Execution of Soupbone Pew," is a report of a murder told in a bantering tone reminiscent of Ring Lardner. Others are gentle spoofs on his old home town in the West, sketches of Army life in the Spanish-American War, or idyllic reminiscences of childhood...
...struggle for political power. One of its clawing rivals for leadership was William Foster, head of the Trade Union Educational League, the party's labor decoy. He was born in Taunton, Mass, in 1881, onetime worker in a rendering plant, seaman, streetcar motorman, homesteader, gandy dancer, Wobbly and hobo. Stalin ended all rivalries in 1930 by enshrining Earl Browder at the top. Browder, born in Wichita, Kans. in 1891, was a onetime bookkeeper for a drug house, flute player, mystic and draft resister in World War I, for which he went to prison...