Word: mother
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Mother's Day, a Manhattan store offered the "all-in-one shears, a many-armed gadget which can be used as a fish sealer, bottle opener, nutcracker, screw-cap opener, hook extractor, pliers, screw driver, or hammer...
...were ragged; torn gloves dangled from his filthy hands; he wore long underwear and no trousers. In a matter-of-fact voice he explained that he was Paul Makushak, 33. For ten years, or maybe it was eleven, he said, he had been living in the cramped cubbyhole. His mother, Anna, had fed him by lowering food through the chimney on a clothesline. When his mother became sick and had to be taken to Greenpoint Hospital, she had asked her neighbor, Mrs. Kowalsky, to take over...
Hiding was his own idea, Paul Makushak said: he had just not liked the way the world was going. Certainly no one should blame his mother. The police, who get used to strange things, looked hard at the small hideaway and sniffed. They were not sure Makushak had been living there for a decade, but someone had been living there messily for a long time...
Paul Makushak had succeeded, as far as police could learn, in his desire to be alone. No one except his mother had known he was there. His father, Peter, had been told years ago to stay downstairs, and he had stayed, sleeping in the back of his jumbled first-floor tailor shop and dry-goods store. Peter Makushak rarely saw his wife and believed her story that their son had gone to Canada...
Like the charmed rats of Hamelin, Americans scamper to follow the compelling advertisement, convinced that it would be disloyal and remiss not to "remember mother," assured that one remembers best with cash, once a year. The business index will rise perceptibly, the sweet smell of roses and caramels will steep the land, but on Monday mother will be back at the washtub or Garden Club, bored, neglected, and tired. --from the May 9, 1947, CRIMSON