Word: peddler
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...British are famous for their toleration of eccentrics, but this can be intolerable to the eccentric himself if he is a dedicated exhibitionist. Bernard Kops has been a poor Jewish evacuee from the blitzed East End of London, a waiter, an actor in terrible road companies, a book peddler, a songwriter, a bum in London and Paris and tout for a brothel in Tangier. He has told all in a sort of breathless antistyle that can be the most irritating of all styles. Every frightful thing that happened to him (and the rare pleasant event) is told in exactly...
...President's TV report on the test ban treaty, he used Mr. Khrushchev's own words to emphasize a point, saying that in case of a nuclear exchange, "the living will envy the dead." This not only qualifies him as Fright Peddler No. 2, but also effectively scuttles his own fallout shelter program. The pitch now is that in case of attack, we should all run out and get all the radiation we can, since the survivors will be worse off than the dead...
...investigator. This was the Prohibition era and the days when the Harding Administration was brewing up the notorious Teapot Dome scandal. Means was all over the place: he hauled in huge profits selling liquor permits (ostensibly for medicinal and other restricted purposes), and became a topflight influence peddler. He wrote a book about President Harding in which he "revealed" that Mrs. Harding herself had murdered her husband with poison. He was tossed out of the Government, eventually nailed on charges of attempted bribery and violating the Prohibition laws, and locked up for more than three years...
Golden winds up with the tale of a peddler whose first name is still a household word. He was a Bavarian immigrant named Levi Strauss. He sailed to San Francisco in 1852 with a batch of denim canvas. Strauss hoped to sell the fabric for tenting, but noticed that the men needed pants that would hold up in the rugged gold-mining hills of California. The canvas started his inimitable blue jeans, called Levi's, walking all over the world...
...citadel of Arab finance is an undistinguished grey-walled building in Amman on the edge of the Jordan desert. It is the Arab Bank, the first as well as the largest Arab-owned bank. Its bluff, barrel-chested founder and chairman is Abdul Hameed Shoman, 75, a onetime haberdashery peddler who ranged the U.S. before returning home to open a bank dedicated as much to helping Arabs as it is to making profits. Shoman excels at making helping pay. Last week, as the Arab Bank released its 1962 report, everything set new records: operating profits rose to $13.1 million...