Word: peoria
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Small wonder that most of the Châteaux Peoria enterprises are tiny by California standards and much of their wine is sold locally, often on their own premises. Few have more than 100 acres in vines. (On the other hand, Burgundy's La Romanée-Conti vineyard, one of the world's most justly famed, encompasses barely 4½ acres.) Some of their owners, and professional oenologists, point out that the soil and microclimate in, say, parts of Massachusetts and Michigan are in many ways closer to the great winegrowing regions of Europe than are overheated...
Pryor's hostility toward white society can be traced back to Peoria, 111., where he grew up. He likes to say that his grandmother was the madam of a whore house and that from the beginning he saw white men debasing black women. He may be telling the truth, but no one in Peoria remembers, and the street where his grandmother lived has been blasted away by urban renewal. What is certainly true is that Pryor, now 36, grew up in a poor and broken family. By 14 he had quit school and started work as a janitor...
...teacher in Peoria had encouraged him to become a performer, and when he returned from Germany he started a routine there at a little club. In 1963 he went to New York City and cabarets in Greenwich Village. He wanted to be like Bill Cosby, the first black comedian to achieve national success. As he remembers, he said to himself: "Goddamn it. This nigger's doin' what I'm fixin' to do. I want to be the only nigger. Ain't no room for two niggers...
...walked off the stage. What had happened was that he realized he was not Cosby, the smooth, controlled comic of the cerebrum. He was, if anyone, Lenny Bruce, the angry, violent screamer from the acid gut. Pryor changed his act, bringing it back in spirit to Peoria's black ghetto and the mean streets all over the U.S. He started to talk in the argot of the pool shark and the hustler, a language so obscene that it is no longer obscene, with four-letter words so common that they now seem part of the verbal furniture...
Mary L. Ierulli, who will be a high school senior next fall in Peoria, Ill., hadn't really decided what she would do this summer when she got a letter from the Harvard Summer School asking her to consider coming here in June...