Word: modestly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...mood of biting irony, President Roosevelt made sport of Congress for voting itself a porkish pension plan (see p. 16). Said he: If I chose to pay a few dollars a year until I leave the White House, I could retire on a modest pension of $37,500 a year for the rest of my life.* Literal minds promptly raised a howl. Next day, White House Secretary Steve Early had to explain the President's humor: The Boss, he said, had been speaking "facetiously," had no idea at all of asking for a pension. (Or, mumbled some newsmen...
...silent as a chess player. (His one relaxation, in fact, is chess; his fellow Army men well know the Shaposhnikov end game.) He is personally cold and reticent, and he stays out of the political light. He is modest to the brink of affectation; his books are almost coquettish: "Our present immature work. ... If the magnanimous reader will do us the great honor of further following our reasoning. . . ." This silence and super-modesty have saved his political head time & again...
...Alexander Graham Bell (telephone), who spent the last 30 years of his life and some $250,000 on the project. In 1886, summering with his family in Nova Scotia, Bell bought an ewe for his children to play with. When they returned next season, there were two sheep-a modest increase indeed, Bell thought, considering that young pigs were usually produced by the dozen, kittens and puppies by the half dozen. If sheep were only one-sixth as prolific as pigs, the poverty of his shepherd neighbors, who grazed their flocks among Nova Scotia's bleak hills, would...
...soft light on the dirty sidewalk, the modest little brass sign--"The Crimson." Vag turned in at the door, with a mental prayer that none of the editors would forget to be there. They hadn't: Cleveland, Brookline, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, Cincinnati and New York--what a joyous progeny of Uncle Sam! And there, hanging from the chandelier grinning inanely was Inchball, good old Feather stone cough, who never failed to wing his way from Shangri-La for this sad, glad occasion. Vag felt a sudden exuberance, even before the punch was made; he was amoosed though confoosed...
...project of buying up some 200,000 corporate-owned acres of sugar-cane lands, dividing them into tracts of 500 acres or less, then selling them to the hungry, landless jibaros on 40-year terms. So far, not a cent has been spent. Appraisers are still checking over two modest plantations whose owners offered to sell...