Word: hosts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Eager to follow up on the phenomenal success of Teddy and a second hit, the Lazer Tag ray-gun game, WOW has introduced a host of high-tech toys, including talking versions of Mickey Mouse and Mother Goose. But the new products have not generated enough sales to cover promotion costs...
...spent ten days poking around farms, processing plants and supermarkets. At one cattle ranch, he asked to see "some of the workers." The rancher replied that there were none; he ran the spread of several hundred acres with only his family and a handful of day laborers. A Canadian host who speaks Russian heard Gorbachev mutter under his breath, "We are not going to see this ((in the Soviet Union)) for another 50 years." Eugene Whelan, then Minister of Agriculture and Gorbachev's official host, was surprised on another occasion to hear the Soviet leader comment about the invasion...
...Says Chrystal: "He does believe, never having been here, that the U.S. has abject poverty and quite a lot of it. My impression is that he thinks there are whole towns that are just sort of destitute." Eugene Whelan, the former Canadian Agriculture Minister who was later Gorbachev's host in North America, also visited him in 1981 and got into an argument about armaments. Says Whelan: "He was going on about how the U.S. was the aggressor, how it was making weapons. He said the U.S. was returning to the conditions of the 1950s." When Whelan remonstrated that...
...been party chief in, say, Murmansk in the far north, he would never have become General Secretary. But in Stavropol Krai, he was on hand to welcome top Moscow officials who came to the local spas at Mineralnye Vody and Kislovodsk for vacations and medical treatment. They found their host unusual in several respects. Says Soviet Historian Roy Medvedev: "A regional party first secretary who was intelligent and congenial would have been considered untypical. If Gorbachev had yelled, sworn, been a heavy drinker or a high liver with a rest house outside of town where officials could be entertained...
Gorbachev was not like that at all. He was a quiet and pleasant host with a reputation throughout the district for incorruptibility. Writer Maximov relates a story about a mutual friend, a poet, who asked Gorbachev as a young Komsomol official to help him buy a Volga sedan. Gorbachev obligingly used his influence to speed delivery. The poet promptly sold the car on the black market and returned to ask Gorbachev for help in buying another. Says Maximov: "Gorbachev did not usually lose his temper, but on that occasion he started shouting and threw the poet out of his office...