Word: optometrist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Billy lives through the war merely because he happens not to die in it, then becomes a husband and a prosperous optometrist for equally random reasons. He acquires a Reagan-stickered Cadillac and a son named Robert, who graduates from failure as a high school alcoholic to "the famous Green Berets" and becomes a fine young man, fighting in Viet Nam. The only trouble is that Billy sometimes just can't keep from bursting into tears...
...Service System. The way it goes is this: the Selective Service tells the students that they can only go to college for four years. No more graduate school, unless you want to be something helpful, like a doctor, or a dentist, or a veterinarian, or an osteopath, or an optometrist, or a chiropodist, or a minister, or a research scientist. Or, you can be something else helpful, like a farmer, or an apprentice riveter, or a glass-blower, or the Vice President of the United States. The Selective Service makes the rules: how sick you can be, how crazy...
People with corrected vision of 20/200 or worse are legally blind. Even with magnifying glasses or special reading spectacles, they cannot read ordinary newspaper or magazine print. Some 420,000 Americans fall into this category; to help them see, Manhattan Optometrist Dr. William Feinbloom has developed "reading binoculars" that magnify 3.5 times and enable many of the legally blind who are not totally sightless to read with relative ease...
...bluff big. After all, ?400,000 is waiting in the Bank of England for the rightful Romanov heir. Some blind Russian peasants who happen to be milling around the streets of Berlin oblige by blubbering "Little Mother" all over the set, and it is clear that only an optometrist could prevent Prince Paul (John Michael King) and the Dowager Empress (Lillian Gish) from falling all over their royal relative...
When World War II broke out, Mac enlisted as an army private after memorizing an optometrist's chart so that his poor eyesight wouldn't keep him out. He became an officer, was assigned as a military aide to Admiral Alan G. Kirk. In wartime London, Bill Bundy recalls, Mac knew all the right people. "He went to Harold Laski's soirees on Tuesday night and Lady Astor's on the weekend. It was a balanced ticket...