Word: ma
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Fifty years ago the U.S. scene was enlivened and not infrequently disturbed by veritable armies of Irish couples very much like Ma & Pa Love-who met and married in the New World, raised a family of six on an iron molder's pay and managed to send them out into the world feeling that only ill luck or (that ultimate folly) leading with a right could keep them from inheriting the earth. But while most American immigrant families prefer to forget their early struggles-or make them sound like Life with Father-the Love tribe remembers the triumphs...
...result is a wonderful piece of Americana, full of the smell of beer and coal smoke-and of the potato soup on which Ma fed her brood, sometimes for weeks on end, when Pa was looking for a job or "fighting the interests" during one of the dozens of strikes in which he was privileged to take part. Pa was a formidable and handsome man-tall, erect, curly-haired and with a straight right capable of breaking a man's jaw. Ma was handsome and formidable too-once she hit a slum bully over the head with a ball...
...They Got Married. Pa was a rebel, who had marched with Coxey's Army, and boomed about the docks, harvest fields and foundries of the U.S., indulging his love of fisticuffs and agitating for the union shop. Ma, who had worked as a nursemaid for a rich Cleveland family (and named four of her children after theirs before Pa caught on), yearned for respectability. Ma always said she had married Pa against her better judgment: "That man . . . wouldn't take no for an answer." Pa's story was a little different. "I was keeping company with your...
...during their married lives Ma & Pa engaged in daily verbal sparring-usually before breakfast. But they faced the world stoutly and together-a world which consisted for years of drafty old houses (once the family lived in a tent) and endless peregrinations in search of work (Ma always bought just one railroad ticket, sent her big brood scurrying off through the train to hide in the lavatories...
Beefy, bustling Chichi Remón long ago erased the word mañana from his personal operations. He joined the police, Panama's only armed force, in 1931, and immediately began moving up. After wartime training in the U.S., he became police chief and his country's strong man in 1947. Since then, he has made and unmade five Presidents. When one of them tried to ease him out of his job in 1949, he fired the President in a pre-dawn coup. Prosperous (from cattle and other private interests) and powerful, Chichi was content to stay...