Word: laird
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...these wide open spaces, Americans are a new species. Mollie Regan, red-haired and illegitimate daughter of one Regan, meets Stanton Laird, oil geologist from Oregon. His rival is David Cope, a "pommy" (Australian slang for English immigrant) who runs a neighboring station, a pint-size affair of about 300,000 acres. Mollie goes off to Oregon with the ice-cream addict, Stanton, but when she discovers that the U.S. frontier has been all softened up by milk shakes and civilization, she returns to the rum and mutton of the Australian never-never to cope with Cope...
Born Nov. 18, 1904, son of a minor Lowland laird...
...theater is Tuxahatchie County, with its poor-white farms and rich bottom lands. Virtue is represented by Fate Laird, who comes onstage with a roll of factory-wage dollar bills pinned to his work shirt. He has a vision of the good life, where he plows a straight furrow in bare feet, and feels the good black soil of the valley squinch between his toes. It is Faulkner country, but there is a difference between Deal's Tuxahatchie and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. In Faulkner's unprincipled principality, it is the proletarian Snopses who slither to power over...
Book Gresham's evil power is opposed by Brother Cox, the "webbed faced" preacher who tries to close the valley honky-tonk but loses his "holy war agin sin" when Book frames him for "a sight of carrying-on'' with a no-good girl. Fate Laird takes on too much when he gives Bodoc a job and takes the preacher's side against the courthouse-cathouse gang. Laird's son Clay shoots a mean deputy and is convicted of murder in Book Gresham's court. But in the end a sort of moral truce...
...While Laird was being sworn into the Senate (and parrying questions about any intention of remaining there), Democrats at home jockeyed for election to the Kilgore term, which runs until Jan. 3, 1959. Among the contestants: ex-Classmate William C. Marland...