Word: loon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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REPORT TO SAINT PETER (220 pp.)-Hendrik Willem van Loon-Simon & Schuster...
When he died at 62 (TIME, March 20, 1944), Popularizer Van Loon left this fragment of an autobiography. He began it, he said, partly as a response to letters from servicemen who wanted a plain account of "what this world is all about." Readers may get a few of Van Loon's notions on that subject in the avuncular Van Loon style (history as kiddy talk), but they will learn from this autobiography very little about Van Loon. It appears to have been designed for a leisurely, Montaignesque 700 pages and unfortunately ends just when it begins to warm...
Durocher was visibly hurt. He said Christian had broken his jaw falling into a water trough. He described Christian's heckling as inhumanly abrasive-worse than that of the gifted stentor, Ebbets Field Hilda, whose loon-like cries are supposed to carry to the Mississippi. Patiently, almost demurely, he recalled: "As we say in baseball, he had a tremendously loud voice." On June 9, the night of the alleged beating, said Durocher, softly, Christian had ridden the Dodger pitcher, Curt Davis, into a lather:* "Davis is an elderly gentleman in the vicinity of 42 today." Durocher explained...
...they went to the nearest Towne, found a preacher, and asked him to Meriam. As they McNeilled before him, he wished them a life of Bliss. They Liveseyed happily for some time thereafter, until she caught him spending too much of his time drinking beer in a Bar loon (poetic license). She seized a gun--there was a sudden Bursk of fire, and he fell dead. She couldn't live without him, so she shot herself, too; thus ending our story. (By this time you are probably wondering where in de Haas we get such ideas...
...Shop, Inc (operated by the Community Service Society, one of the U.S.'s oldest and largest charities) reported a 25% up in sales despite a 12% drop in donations. And the Actor's Thrift Shop has found a customer for the tuxedo of the late Hendrik van Loon (6 ft. 6 in. tall, 85 in. around): the A.W.V.S. bought it to turn into a woman's suit...