Word: peddlers
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...curious Paris meeting raised many questions. Was the flamboyant Rhoodie, who has been accused of high living and free spending during his years as Pretoria's influence peddler, trying to gain some kind of immunity from prosecution? He is currently wanted in the Transvaal, Prime Minister Botha an nounced last week, on grounds of "fraud and possibly theft." Furthermore, if Van den Bergh was a former superspook, why did he clumsily allow the press to discover the details of the Paris meeting? If he and Van Zyl were acting in their government's behalf, why did South African...
Stories about shabby beggars who hoard secret fortunes are commonplace enough, but Eddie the Monkey Man, who died in his sleep last month at the age of 79, was unique. The son of a Jewish immigrant peddler in Pensacola, Fla., Eddie Bernstein lost both legs at the age of twelve when a train ran over him. He began riding around in a goat cart, selling newspapers. In the mid-'30s, he left the Depression-ridden South and moved to Washington, D.C., where he established himself on a wooden platform on F Street between 12th and 13th Streets. He joked...
...result was a collection that was a pure demonstration of its owner's fantasies. The clothes peddler's son from Grand Street was, at heart, a displaced Edwardian grandee, longing for the class (high, slightly raffish, demanding and Anglophile) into which he had not been born. His conversation had the pungency of a vanished era; it demanded, and got, a great deal of time and attention. It coiled and ran and turned back on itself, wandering off into apparent non sequiturs to test the listener, piling metaphor on private joke, allusion on trope, and then puncturing the entire...
Store owners are indignant. In response to the "peddler plague," and to help control the selling of drugs on the side, New York City Mayor Ed Koch last month recommended that all vendors be required to provide proof of state and city sales tax payment, and display the selling price of all items. Such rules would be even harder to enforce than the present regulation that puts some popular areas of the city off-limits. The public does not support clean-up efforts, apparently feeling that a patrolman's time might be better spent tracking down muggers than peddlers...
Lucrative business, this, largely because there is almost no overhead, no rent, and, usually, no taxes. New York police estimate that a general-merchandise peddler makes an average of $15,000 a year; some boast of taking in $1,000 a day. Lobsang Khendup, 46, an enterprising wood-crafter in San Francisco, supports a wife and three sons on annual street sales of $22,000. "What better job is there?" asks Ellie Cohen, 29, who sells her own home-baked goods in Miami in the whiter and in Portsmouth, N.H., in the summer. " work for myself. If I get tired...