Word: octogenarian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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From Kenneth Wilson, the Christian Herald's executive editor, the octogenarian and the guests heard a eulogy of affection tempered with humor: "If there's a banner to be waved, he'll wave it. If he doesn't have an opinion, he'll get one while you are waiting. When everyone knows it is safer to let the dust settle first, often as not he is helping to create the dust. He has the uncanny knack 99% of the time of being found, when the dust does settle, on the side of the saints...
...remain on in the house as a nonpaying guest. But Novelist O'Connor is less interested in plot than in the smoky tang of Irish talk and in the embalmment of a cast of characters as Stereotyped as Mrs. O'Leary's cow-Father McGovern, an octogenarian priest who rejoices fiercely every time a parishioner precedes him to the grave; Al Gottlieb, a Jewish businessman who prattles like a borscht-circuit comic...
...sect's late founder. Standing in its silk-bedecked interior, McNamara placed both hands before his chest in the Bud dhist attitude of prayer and bowed. Afterward, the visitors stood beaming as Khanh presented a U.S.-made hearing aid to the founder's mother, a partly deaf octogenarian who still lives on the place; the old woman seemed baffled but appreciative...
Hardly anyone could believe that carefully curried Cary Grant had turned 60. But not even Sophie Tucker could believe that she was 80. After a one-candle-cake celebration during her annual birthday engagement at New Orleans' Roosevelt Hotel, she took issue with her reported octogenarian status. "I'm 76," protested the very last of the red-hot mamas. "I'll tell you why the statistics are mixed up. I was 16 when I first went to New York, and the law was you couldn't work in a cabaret until you were...
What will remain, for a while, is the memory of a crusty, highhanded octogenarian who clung pathetically to power well beyond the moment when he should have relinquished it. Ultimately, however, Konrad Adenauer can only be remembered as the German whose idealism and hardheaded grasp of reality in one decade transformed the nature and condition of 20th century Germany. Winston Churchill accurately called him "the greatest German statesman since Bismarck," but even Bismarck's Germany did not rise from the rubble and bitterness of defeat to the position of respect and responsibility that West Germany enjoys today...