Word: peddlers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Collector. Gulbenkian was reputedly born in Istanbul, the son of an Armenian rug peddler, by one version; according to another, the descendant of a long line of Armenian kings. He became a British subject in 1902 and went to King's College, London, although the story still lingers that he entered England as a rug peddler, smuggling in his three-year-old son in a carpet. In any case, Gulbenkian early made himself a useful agent in the Near East for the late Sir Henri Deterding, Royal Dutch-Shell's head...
Billy the Kid. That is life in the "upholstered trap" fashioned for himself by William Samuel Rosenberg, born in 1899 on a kitchen table on Manhattan's Lower East Side. His father was a peddler who would rather have been a poet. "When people were doing passementerie," says Billy, "he was in fringe." On the fringe is where the Rosenbergs lived. They never held on to a set of rooms for long; it was cheaper to move (to The Bronx or to Brooklyn) than pay the rent...
...people of Paris," wrote François Rabelais in the 16th Century, "are so foolish by nature that a juggler, a pardon-peddler, a mule with bells . . . will gather a bigger crowd than a good evangelic preacher ever could." Four centuries later, between 1920 and 1935, Parisian jugglers and pardon-peddlers were gathering one of the biggest, strangest crowds in French history-a throng of U.S. expatriates, fleeing the New World of Harding, Coolidge, and their own disconsolate selves. Says Samuel Putnam, who went to Paris in 1926 to translate the works of Rabelais, and stayed seven years, writing sometimes...
...Brewing Business. The firm was started by James Smith, a Scottish carpenter, who supposedly got a recipe for cough drops from a peddler. He began brewing 5-lb. batches in his kitchen, sent sons William and Andrew to hawk the drops. After James died, the bewhiskered sons put the drops in boxes, stamped their faces on the cartons, and moved into a factory on "Cough Drop Street...
Mobster Luciano, pimp and drug peddler, was beginning to look like a nice guy -if anybody believed the columns. Since he had been sprung from prison and deported to Italy, some of the columnists had discovered a heart of gold beating under his silk shirt. Somehow, said the keyhole-peepers, Lucky from his prison cell had helped the U.S. win the war. The Mirror's Walter Winchell solemnly assured his readers that after Lucky died, the Congressional Medal of Honor would be awarded...