Word: knacks
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With a soldier's knack for getting right to the bottom of things, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery thought he knew how to find out if his World War II commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, will run for the U.S. presidency in 1952. Arriving in Manhattan for conferences, Monty said: "I shall ask Ike if he is going to run when I see him next week...
...Producer. In her 18 years as one of the two regulars among Broadway's few women producers,* Regina's Cheryl Crawford has managed to combine hardheaded business instinct and high-minded theatrical taste. The results were more praiseworthy than profitable until she found a knack for offbeat musicals: 1942's revival of Porgy and Bess, 1943's One Touch of Venus, 1947's Brigadoon-her biggest hit, after some of the town's canniest producers had turned it down...
...with the help of a CBS office boy. A free-lance fan magazine piece about the late Crooner Russ Colombo won him a Warners' writer contract when he was 20, and his career began in earnest. As a producer, after nine years of scripting, he quickly displayed a knack for grabbing story ideas out of the headlines (Action in the North Atlantic, Destination Tokyo), and for hastily getting aboard profitable trends. Example: no sooner had Paramount proved that a spicy James M. Cain story like Double Indemnity could be put on the screen than Wald got to work...
...knack for administration was uncanny: he showed an instantaneous grasp of personnel problems, gave subordinates snappy decisions which constantly left them with an awed "why-didn't-I-think-of-that?" feeling. He handled his bosses with equal ease. The day he learned that peppery Lord Beaverbrook was taking over the Ministry, young Franks mourned to a friend that "that awful little man" would wreck the organization. Then he had a second thought, and added: "I think I'll look into the office over the weekend...
Newsmen finally did, however, dig out something of what went on-and printed it. The fact seemed to be that Britain, which had been in at the start but not at the finish of atom-bomb making, had at last just about solved the knack of making them. That fact, if it were a fact, had enormous consequences. For one thing, if the U.S. no longer had an atomic monopoly, it would no longer have sole say in what to do about the atom...