Word: mortician
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...Mortician's Dream. In 1948, Frank Curtin bought a small farmhouse on a 1½-acre lot near Falls Church, and began to build a $42,500 home there. Two years later, he was dismayed to find that Gravedigger Marlowe had bought 63 acres to the east and south of his land, and was planning to extend National Memorial Park to the Curtin fenceline. Citing an old Virginia law that prohibits cemeteries closer than 750 ft. to residences, Curtin argued the matter in court. The court ruled that the law did not apply to existing cemeteries, and National Park...
...faith based on known performance. Neither is glamour or sex appeal. If we as a party, at this late date, propose to risk our political future on such slender attributes, then I say the party is dead and we are met here today merely to select a good-looking mortician to preside over the final rites...
...businessman in Pawnee City, Neb. (pop. 1,595). There, "Lightning Ken" Wherry parlayed his family's furniture business into a bigger furniture store, an automobile agency, a law office, a real-estate firm and an undertaking parlor. (Washington reporters, to his intense irritation, later dubbed him "The Merry Mortician.") When he shifted to politics as a protégé of liberal Senator George Norris, Wherry hustled up votes for the Republican state committee with the same zeal and the same methods he had used to open new selling territories or to organize the Pawnee County Fair...
When Senator Kenneth Wherry, Republican floor leader and onetime Nebraska mortician, made reference last week to "the Senator from New Michigan," gallery regulars promptly added it to their growing list of Wherryisms. Samples: addressing the chair as "Mr. Paragraph," offering a comment as "my unanimous opinion," referring to Indo-China as "Indigo China" and the old War Department Civil Functions Bill as the Civil War Functions Bill, calling Spessard Holland of Florida "the Senator from Holland" and Oregon's Wayne Morse "the distinguished Senator from junior...
Maryland's Senator Herbert O'Conor tried a bit of oil. "May I ask just one question?" he said, with a mortician's delicacy of tone. "I don't want to pursue it. This is as to Mr. Ragen [a Chicago race-wire owner who, according to the committee, was murdered just before Greasy Thumb & Co. took over his service]. Would you answer whether you knew Mr. James Ragen?" Said Greasy Thumb hopefully: "If I answer that question, would you stop...