Word: lia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years ago, when she was only eleven, pretty, brown-eyed Melody Sachko (rhymes with Natch, Joe) had plodded through to the finals of the annual Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee. But that time, the Pittsburgh policeman's daughter tripped over atelier (she spelled it "ate-lia") and wound up in sixth place. Then Melody's mother, Natalie, took over. She drilled Melody over the dishwashing, left her little time for her favorite diversion: shooting pool in the basement. Thumbing through dictionaries, Natalie Sachko typed out some 25,000 words-each with its correct pronunciation and meaning-on individual...
...Mother's Son." In his exterior, Juscelino Kubitschek resembles his handsome father, João Oliveira, a gay, clever but improvident amateur poet, who died when Juscelino was two. Inside, he is far more like his prim, pious mother Júlia. Stern Widow Júlia reared the boy and his older sister Maria on a schoolteacher's salary. Harried and embittered by poverty, Júlia drilled into her son a fierce will to succeed. Now a hale-looking 83, she still calls him by his boyhood nickname...
...reality I am more my mother's son than my father's," Juscelino Kubitschek said recently. Blue-eyed Júlia, granddaughter of a German-speaking immigrant from what is now Czechoslovakia, continued to go by her maiden name after her marriage, and Juscelino grew up as Kubitschek rather than Oliveira. Now that he is famous, his countrymen rarely pronounce the name Kubitschek; he is simply "Juscelino," just as Vargas was always "Getulio...
Even by the standards of Diamantina, the Kubitschek family was poor. When Júlia had taught her son all she could, she persuaded Diamantina's Roman Catholic seminary to take him as a pupil at a reduced tuition fee. On his first day of school, Juscelino, then eleven, put on his first pair of shoes, bought with money earned as a grocer's errand boy. Recalls one of his seminary teachers: "I never saw such a remarkable memory in a child. He could recite an entire page by heart after reading it once. He was not what...
After a few years, even cut-rate fees proved too costly for Júlia's pinched purse, and Juscelino had to leave school. At 18, having taught himself Morse code, he qualified as an operator in the Minas Gerais state telegraph system. He left home for Belo Horizonte, the state capital, with one spare shirt and a roast chicken. During the months he had to wait for an opening, he lived largely on bread...