Word: indiana
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Argument. Willkie is an Indiana crackerbox debater in store clothes, and full of intellectual hops. He has an unruly mop of brown hair, a barrel chest, and he stands six feet one in spite of stooping as if he were perpetually leaning over a jury box. When he sits in a chair he sprawls like a sheepdog at rest but his blue, humor-flecked eyes look out from under knitted brows waiting for the argument to begin...
...gives tongue. He swings a leg over the arm of the chair, his coat begins to crawl up his back, his big hands move in expressive gesture. In a few minutes he is sitting up straight, his forelock is hanging in his eyes. His talk, with a native Indiana tang, is even more vigorous. To hell with formality. He talks as men do in the locker room, and spices his profanity with the Bible, Shakespeare and law. He spills out figures, dates, technical facts, historical parallels. When the argument grows hot his eyes get hawklike and his stubborn upper...
...being that sort of man Wendell Willkie gets $75,000 a year, but he has never owned an automobile. (Old Indiana friends say that when he did try driving an automobile he was a menace, always arguing over his shoulder, frequently letting go the wheel to gesture with both hands.) Between his apartment on Manhattan's upper Fifth Avenue and his office on narrow, downtown Pine Street he uses subways and taxicabs...
...Germany after the revolts against the tottering Metternich absolutism in 1848. When Wendell was born in 1892 his father, Herman Willkie, was a lawyer and a wealthy landowner in the town of Elwood, Ind. (pop. 10,685). His mother was also a lawyer, the first woman member of the Indiana bar, and besides tending her family (six children, of whom Wendell was the third) helped her husband in his law practice. Elwood was then riding high. Natural gas had been discovered and the supply was so plentiful that no one took the trouble to turn out the street lights...
...from campus soapboxes. By the time he became sophomore he was a leader of the campus "barbs," roared against the fraternities, preached revolt against the university faculty. One of the fraternity leaders (Beta Theta Pi) was his aristocratic friend Paul Vories McNutt, whom Willkie still likes to josh at Indiana University alumni dinners. But in two or three years Willkie's socialism wore out. As a senior he even broke down and joined the pompadoured Betas, but he did not brush his hair...