Word: pearsons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Washington, D.C., finagling for a low number has always consumed considerable time and energy. Most coveted are the tags from 1 to 1250. No. 1 belongs to the president of the board of District of Columbia commissioners (which issues all D.C. licenses). Chief Justice Earl Warren has 10, Drew Pearson 25, Roman Catholic Archbishop Patrick A. O'Boyle 37, Attorney General Robert Kennedy 50. So intense, in fact, has been the infighting for tags that, starting in 1965, the commissioners decreed that apart from the 1-1250 series anybody could order any combination of letters and numbers...
...Forrestal's depression was a barrage of vilification from the left-wing press. Forrestal, it was said, had ordered that I. G. Farben not be bombed because he owned stock in the company; Forrestal was an "anti-Semite" and a "front man" for U.S. oil companies. Columnists Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell spread the phony story that Forrestal had panicked and run away when his wife was held up by a gunman. The night Forrestal jumped to his death, he left a book open to a passage from Sophocles' Ajax: Better to die, and sleep The never-waking...
...Pearson's problem is that the telephone company's image is well-nigh perfect. Its charges are known to be just, equitable and, in any case, virtually incontestable; its poles are tall as trees and much neater; its only enemies are unenlightened woodpeckers, public service commissions, and the parents of teenagers. How satirize such perfection? Pearson does his best by suggesting that company executives are only human when trapped behind filing cabinets with neurotic secretaries, but this is squalid stuff. (How little adultery there was in Shakespeare...
Saving the Image. Finally, Pearson resorts to farce; he gets a subscriber's cat up a corporate pole. To lend a note of modish company and public policy to this event, the cat's owner is a woman of color who alleges discrimination in the company's indifference to her poled pet. Before this cat is rescued, corporate structure has changed, old Edwards is as mad as Lear, two linesmen have been killed, a small boy damaged, but the company image is saved...
...Pearson's thoroughly enjoyable novel is written with the vulgar high spirits of a man who is under no sort of illusion that he is either rendering a public service or creating a work of art. Virtue Smith is a memorable invention. He has devised a way of life for himself that he calls "daylighting." He does Bell's work in two hours; the other six he sits happily at his desk compiling an encyclopedic diary of the company at work...