Word: legless
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...newspapers. In the mid-'30s, he left the Depression-ridden South and moved to Washington, D.C., where he established himself on a wooden platform on F Street between 12th and 13th Streets. He joked and chattered and begged for his living. Women shoppers often took pity on the legless panhandler, and one of them, Evalyn McLean, owner of the Hope diamond, gave him a capuchin monkey named Gypsy. It did tricks for what Bernstein called his "clients...
...smashed through the windshield of her car. Police Officer P.L. Thornton rushed up. "The glass just exploded with bits of glass and blood. We thought everyone was dead," he recalled. Lackily, Mrs. Fuller and her baby suffered only minor cuts. Police Sergeant Ken Hargrove told of a headless and legless male torso still strapped to an aircraft seat, with shirt and tie intact. An eIderly woman trembled as she recalled seeing "a man's hand and another part of a body lying on my street...
...deformed. If the new book seems less academic and theoretical than many of the author's earlier works, it is simply because, as Fiedler says, "you can't talk about abstractions when you talk about freaks." R.Z. Sheppard Excerpt "Children who are born legless or armless, their limbs amputated by a tangled umbilical cord, are sometimes hard to tell from true phocomelics, or seal-children, with vestigial hands and feet attached directly to the torso. But once identified, they are primarily felt as objects not of awe but of pity. The true Freak, however, stirs both supernatural terror...
...movie's funniest moment occurs when Robert Preston, a Texas oilman who owns the team, attempts to proselytize for this cult. He has had an office built to facilitate practice of his new faith. It has a teeny-tiny door you can enter only on your knees, a legless desk resting on the rug, pictures hung at baseboard level...
Maybe some of my readers were not fooled by the success-story format of my article. But most probably were. We don't like to see things like legless little boys--they contradict our expectations and desires about the world. So we become willing accomplices in a scheme to cover up the truth. We have great psychological use for someone like Robin Starling who can appear to be normal and who therefore affirms what we would like to believe. We can successfully go on fooling ourselves like this because Robin Starling has a great stake in-making sure that...