Word: meagerness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Congressman from Illinois felt strapped. The pay and perquisites seemed inadequate for duties so important to the health of the Republic. Worse, he had to travel home each year to visit his constituents, and the allowance was a meager 40? a mile. What did he do? He padded his expense account, of course. He apparently claimed that he had traveled a total of 3,252 miles round trip from Washington, nearly double the actual mileage, producing a reimbursement of $2,601 for two trips home...
Those who are supposedly part-time officials, like Baldwin, make as little as $85 a week. Even the full-time incumbents get meager pay, from which must be deducted the psychic cost of public cynicism. Don Quaintance of Marion, Ohio, a white-haired, avuncular former businessman who got to the mayor's chair in middle age, thinks that kind of attitude has grown a lot during his eight years in office. He bitterly recalls a dinner with his wife and some friends at the country club. Talk got around to inflation and the size of his salary...
These gnawing problems and meager rewards, one might expect, would add up to an irresistible desire to chuck...
Melvoin watched as motorists pleaded, cajoled and, not infrequently, remained civil while Harrington tried to equitably apportion his meager supply of gasoline. Concluded Melvoin: "A gas-station owner is just another confused citizen, trying to get a handle on what's going...
...mush and mirrors." West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt has conceded that "we should not expect massive breakthroughs at Tokyo" but rather should aim for "a set of priorities about what should and should not be done." As Schmidt said last week, even if their accomplishments have sometimes seemed meager, the economic summits have helped the world avoid a repetition of the great Depression of the 1930s "which would have ruined...