Word: penniless
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Bronx to Park Avenue. The tenth child of an Italian immigrant family in The Bronx, N.Y., Dr. Giorgi (pronounced Georgy) decided in grammar school that she wanted to become a doctor. Penniless when she finished pre-med courses at New York City's Hunter College in the depths of the Depression, she toiled twelve years as a white-collar worker in a trucking company, saving $12,000 while helping the firm increase sixfold in size. Then, after four years at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons, she spent ten years as intern, resident and ultimately chief...
...Lilies of the Field went almost unnoticed as a book, but made it fairly big as a motion picture. Actor Sidney Poitier won an Oscar portraying Homer Smith, the book's footloose handyman hero, who used ingenuity, faith and adobe bricks to build a Catholic chapel for a penniless order of German-speaking nuns. In this sequel, Homer works another miracle when, pressed into service as an evangelist at an old-fashioned hallelujah tent meeting, he inspires a crippled girl to walk. Although his tale is almost too short and slight to be put between hard covers, William Barrett...
...joke, but fixed bouts and blaring publicity led to a payday championship match with the slipping Jack Sharkey. Incredibly, Camera won-on a lucky sixth-round knockout. He lasted only a year, until Max Baer took away his title with eleven knockdowns in eleven rounds. Camera returned to Italy penniless, his purses siphoned away by his handlers, finally settling into a clownish career as a wrestler...
Inevitably, his profligacy drained his spirit. When he left for his last American tour, sick and penniless, he perhaps knew that the end was near. In one of his last letters to Princess Caetani, a sometime patron, he wrote: "It is not enough to presume that once again I shall weave up pardoned, and waddle and gush along the land on my webbed sealegs as musical and wan and smug as an orpheus of the storm: no, I must first defeat any hope I might have of forgiveness by resubmerging the little arisen original monster in a porridge boiling...
...seeing something to laugh at in the bitterest tragedies of the human animal." Her own life started in bitter circumstances. She was born Dorothy Rothschild in 1893 in West End, N.J., of a Scotch mother who died during her infancy and a Jewish father who died, leaving her penniless, when she was in her teens...