Word: parking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ratio the public felt Bentsen had won. Soon, print pundits were pummeling Quayle from both left and right. At first the Bush campaign expressed guarded satisfaction. Quayle was bloodied but unbeaten. Bush's reaction was predictably hyperbolic: Quayle "knocked it right out of the park." But campaign chief Jim Baker, never a Quayle fan, seemed to be damning Dan with faint praise: "When you think about what might have happened, we have to be pretty happy...
Four miles away in Melrose Park, a working-class suburb of modest but tidy homes, live Donald and Stephanie Sled. This summer they packed up their few belongings and moved out of Chicago's westside ghetto, delighted to have found an affordable apartment in Melrose Park. In their excitement to escape the squalor and fear of the ghetto, the Sleds gave little thought to what it might mean to be the first black family in their neighborhood. "This was like heaven," recalls Donald, a 44-year-old handyman who sometimes stutters when excited. "It was so quiet and peaceful...
...Sleds are equally determined. When they moved into their $250-a-month apartment in Melrose Park, they were welcomed by Donna Wilbur, a widow who lives downstairs with her teenage son. But two days later, a car nearly knocked the Sleds' 14-year-old nephew off his bike. "Nigger, what are you doing around here?" the driver shouted. A week later, two wooden fence posts crashed through Wilbur's dining room window, the penalty for welcoming the Sleds to the neighborhood. "It doesn't seem like America with people acting like this," she says...
...Sleds thought their troubles would be financial, not racial. Together they make $16,000 a year -- less than Melrose Park's $22,000 median family income. Donald operates an elevator in a downtown bank. Stephanie, 35, works the midnight shift as a cashier in a filling station...
...night Donald kept a vigil at the back-porch window. Then he dozed off. He was awakened at 1 a.m. to find their 1976 Chevy Impala in flames. Across the street four young men laughed and shouted, "Let the car burn. Niggers don't need to be in Melrose Park." One night as Stephanie set out for her cashier's job, several youths waved a rope and taunted her with threats of a lynching. Later a crude wooden cross was burned on the lawn...