Word: pensioners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...abandoning his train in the middle of a run; deliberately tying up traffic until three freights and two passenger trains were stalled at one station. His growing sons cured him of that; he worked his way back to respectability as a brakeman on the Union Pacific, retired on his pension of one dollar a day. Humorless in its domestic episodes, woodenly written except for pages of authentic railroad talk, Railroadman is nevertheless a first-rate U. S. document, the best picture going of an old-time rank & file member of the powerful Railroad Brotherhoods...
Until last year law required that a World War veteran be at least 30% disabled for his wife to get a pension when he died. John Elliott Rankin proposed that this disability requirement be lowered to 10%, so more widows would get more money. Franklin Roosevelt reluctantly compromised on 20% rather than face another fight with veteran-conscious Congressmen...
...Congress was beginning to hand out Civil War pensions. It gave one to the widow of the Civil War President. Mary Todd Lincoln's $3,000* a year was the first pension for a Presidential widow. Since then pensions have been granted to nine other Presidential widows-Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sarah Childress Polk, Julia Dent Grant, Lucretia Rudolph Garfield, Ida Saxton McKinley, Edith Carow Roosevelt, Helen Herron Taft, Edith Boiling, Galt Wilson, Grace Goodhue Coolidge. Last week this polite beneficence was impolitely questioned for the first time...
Ohio-born Mary Scott Lord Dimmick had been widowed by Lawyer Walter Erskine Dimmick when she married Benjamin Harrison-in 1896, four years after he left the White House, five years before he died. Last week the Senate Pensions Committee favorably reported a bill grant Mrs. Harrison, now nearing 80, a $5,000 annuity such as other Presidential widows have received, but Massachusetts David Ignatius Walsh found it his unpleasant duty" to file a formal protest. Pointing out that Mrs. Harrison never "shared the burdens of official life with President Harrison" and that both her husbands left her trust funds...
Although the possibility that anything could stop the Harrison pension remained slim indeed, Mrs. Harrison's friends sprang indignantly to her defense. Ihey denied that she had sought the pension herself, recalled that the resolution had first been introduced by New York's late Representative Theodore A. Peyser at the suggestion of "friends," had passed the House unanimously. Most agreed that Mrs. Harrison could use it. All agreed that she deserved it, for sundry reasons. Among them: 1) she had lived in the White House two years nursing her ailing Aunt Lavinia, the first Mrs. Harrison...