Word: hubert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hubert went to the University of Minnesota, but he had to come home after his sophomore year. The Great Depression had struck, and his father needed him to help at the drugstore. For six years Hubert dispensed prescriptions and vaccinated hogs. Hard times confirmed him in the fundamentalist liberal faith from which he would rarely deviate in the years ahead. But even the darkest periods were usually sunny for Hubert. He met a hometown girl, Muriel Buck, at a dance, and she began eating lunch at the Humphrey drugstore. The pair were married and eventually had four children. Always quietly...
...Hubert returned to the University of Minnesota, where he majored in political science and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. When World War II broke out, he tried repeatedly to enlist, but was turned down because of a double hernia and lung calcification. (During the crucial West Virginia presidential primary in 1960, he was unjustly accused of being a draft dodger by John Kennedy's supporters.) He served as Minnesota state director of war-production training, and in 1943 ran for mayor of Minneapolis. He lost, largely because the liberal vote was split between the Democratic Party and the Farmer-Labor...
...been a crackerjack of a funeral, to borrow a term and an attitude from Hubert Humphrey's own exuberant life. How he would have loved it. Airplanes and military honors, the President and the pages, good old hymns badly but enthusiastically sung, organs booming and preachers praying mightily all across the country...
What a grand spectacle. Newspaper headlines and network specials, editors hammering their typewriters to new heights of deadline eloquence: everything being gloriously overdone - at least a little. Friends from far and near in their dark suits standing around telling stories - solemnly at first - about their days and journeys with Hubert, beginning to chuckle and then to laugh out loud, and then reaching for an other bourbon to ease the long, low ache that comes from knowing a great man is gone. Had Hubert, like Tom Sawyer, been able to sneak under the back pews at his own services and witness...
...problem was always how to organize a heart like Hubert's. It beat harder than anybody's, compelling its owner to laugh, shout and run off into every corner of America, bubbling with mirth and his special prairie exaltation. Too often he loitered along the political byroads of America, gabbing and shaking hands and studying individual faces as if each were from the easel of Michelangelo. Of course, he lost the big elections. And he danced with all the fat old ladies in the union halls after the speeches and the first beers. When asked why he squandered...