Word: joiners
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...good show is worth more than a bundle of issues. As a youth he began patterning his clothes and hairdo after William Jennings Bryan's. He sharpened his naturally agile tongue on the works of Texas' once-famed skeptic, Brann the Iconoclast. He became an enthusiastic lodge-joiner and speaker at fraternal gatherings far & wide. By the time he was ready to run for Congress in 1916 he knew all the tricks...
...Governor, Ellis Gibbs Arnall, 35, is the boy wonder of Georgia politics. Short (5 ft. 6), stocky (190 Ib.) pear-shaped, a great joiner and organizer, he got the urge for politicking from a grandfather in the Alabama Legislature. As a twelve-year-old, he worked as page boy in the Alabama House; less than 13 years later, he was a full-fledged member of Georgia's Legislature...
...portly Donald Marr Nelson, the onetime Sears, Roebuck executive who plugged along quietly within the old National Defense Advisory Commission, grew in stature with every reorganization, finally emerged as the nation's Chief of the War Production Board. > Silver-haired, tall, tan and handsome Paul Varies McNutt, a joiner and doer who once looked like a merely ambitious politician, wound up last week as chief of all the nation's manpower in the new War Manpower Commission (see col. 2). > Brisk, terrible-tempered Leon Henderson, the Great Jawbone, who managed the nation's fight against inflation...
When Franklin started the Junto (council), a mutual self-improvement society, among his "ingenious acquaintances," he was a stripling of 21, and his fellow members (a joiner, a surveyor, a glazier, an Oxford scholar, a "young gentleman of some fortune") were not much older. Proceedings were secret and no minutes were kept, But Franklin revealed some of the study topics. Samples: "Whence comes the dew that stands on the outside of a tankard? . . . What unhappy effects of intemperance have you lately observed? ... Is self-interest the rudder that steers mankind?" For excessively dogmatic answers, members had to pay fines...
Aside from willingness to contribute, prime requisite for F. o. B. membership is to be "a fellow being with a bellow feeling" to enjoy windy punning and complex ritual. Payment of one peso initiation fee makes the joiner a Whiff (all non-joiners are Snuffs, ritualistically defined as "infinitely worse than a cross-eyed toad with athlete's foot"). A Whiff becomes a Puff when he pays his first month's levy. A Puff becomes a Gust when, after his entry, 1,000 planes have been shot down and he has paid in ten pesos. When...