Word: humors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...trip to Philadelphia, Postmaster General J. Edward Day offered some comments on an earlier Postmaster named Benjamin Franklin. Not a very good postman was Ben, said Day, with more humor than accuracy. Day, in effect, accused Franklin of nepotism (six relatives on the payroll), unfair business practices (plotting to bar the mails to a rival publisher), and, as a final shaft, "after landing this plum he left for England and stayed 18 years." Philadelphia's Poor Richard Club was not amused. "Franklin may have had some human failings," said a spokesman, ''but at least he was able...
...bitterness, the old man wrests a kind of gallows humor from his life. Noting a hole in his wool sweater, he mutters: "So have a good meal, moths. Soon I'll be dead. You'll have the whole sweater to yourselves. And my suit, too. Not that I think it's worth eating. But then I wouldn't know. I'm not a moth." A reader is torn between exasperation and pity. It is a measure of Fruchter's skill that he can make the old man so grotesque and at the same time...
...troops, President Kennedy declared that he was asking Congress for funds to initiate "a new start on civil defense." In the following months of the year, there arose a shelter industry, a shelter supply service, a shelter controversy, a shelter literature and terminology, and even a form of shelter humor...
Caldwell's greatest talent lies in his ability to rescue from the ordinary whatever humor, whatever unexpected might otherwise slip by into the hour-after-hour sameness of the past. He finds wisdom even in an encounter with a hitchhiker, praises the man's courage to live by bumming ("I take my hat off to you mister") and generally disconcerts the degenerate by taking him so seriously. "My father brought to conversations a cavernous capacity for caring that dismayed strangers," Peter relates. "They found themselves involved, willy-nilly, in a futile but urgent search for the truth...
...cannot be fairly said that Updike has written a pompous book. His merging of myth and biography is light and pleasing, as full of humor and vitality as the man who inspired...