Word: patronize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...American merchandising and perfected a hands-on management that instilled a sense of team enthusiasm among the 380,000 employees he liked to refer to as "associates." In the process, he became America's richest person, his family's wealth estimated at $23 billion. But he also became the patron saint of a down-home style of megawealth; eschewing the fancy trappings of power, "Mr. Sam" drove an '88 Ford pickup truck and hopped around the country to visit stores, take the pulse of consumers and inspire his workers. His passion, his joy, was fine-tuning his vast merchandising network...
...Like any other modern sport, it trades in money and celebrity, scandal and sex appeal; it has big winners and losers, all playing for high stakes, which they are happy to drive into their opponents' little black hearts. To them, Griffin Mill is not a parody; he is a patron saint...
...Crispin, the patron saint of shoemakers,spread Gospel by day and made shoes by night. The3rd century Roman moved to the Aisne, northeast ofParis, and legend holds that he gave away shoes tothe poor. Some suggest that this Robin Hood offootware even stole his materials from the rich.In Lives of Illustrious Shoemakers,published in 1883, William Edward Winks writesthat "such tales are worthless," but honors St.Crispin as one of the first in a long line ofdistinguished shoemakers...
Street person Richard Kreimer won national attention -- and a potful of cash -- when he sued the public library in Morristown, N.J., over a patron code of conduct that banned homeless people with poor personal hygiene. But the self- styled "homeless Ralph Nader" found himself barred from the building once again last week when a federal appeals court in Philadelphia overturned his victory and upheld the right of public libraries to expel vagrants in certain circumstances. A lower court had said the rules were an infringement of Kreimer's First Amendment rights, but the three-judge appeals panel disagreed. Although...
...contentious, raffish, yeasty place of shopkeepers. Catalans, as Robert Hughes sympathetically calls them, pride themselves on their pragmatism and their independent-mindedne ss: two of their sovereign virtues are mesura and ironia. And at the heart of their idealized self-image is seny, or "a natural level-headedness." The patron saint of Barcelona, St. Eulalia, is also the patron saint of stonecutters, bricklayers and millstone makers...