Word: pippins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...barrel in this case is the U.S. Air Force, and Will Stockdale (Andy Griffith) is a pippin. The hillbilly is so dumb he thinks R.O.T.C. is a disease; but he like to bust, he's that crazy about "thuh Ayuh Fowerce." After his first visit to the mess hall, he happily hollers, "Nevah had sech a fill a beans in mah whole lahf...
Sailing for Europe, Novelist John (The Short Reign of Pippin IV) Steinbeck did not yet know the happy news: the state of Oklahoma, which fussed and fumed at his portrait in The Grapes of Wrath of poverty-stricken Okies fleeing their drought-struck land, had at last forgiven him. After Steinbeck told an ABC-TV interviewer that "I've spoken against dust and I've spoken against poverty, but never against Oklahoma," Oklahoma's Governor Raymond Gary named him a member of the Governor's Staff of Oklahoma Boosters...
This typical French family is scarcely prepared for the brouhaha and hurluberlu that follow Pippin's elevation to the throne. There is the grand opening of the "Versailles-Hilton" hotel; the Folies-Bergere holds a contest for the official post of "King's Mistress"; and visiting royalty floods the capital ("Ava Gardner and H.S.H. Kelly are in residence"). Two hundred nobles come out of the woodwork and descend on Versailles, all set to eat Pippin out of house and palace. His daughter's American suitor proposes to merchandise the impoverished monarchy ("The Dukedom of Dallas...
...Pippin travels incognito (on a motor scooter) among his subjects and decides that what France most needs is an F.D.R.-style New Deal, a kind of People's Monarchy. To a stunned constitutional convention met to draw up a Code Pippin, he lays down what he wants to be the law. beginning with the maddeningly un-French notion of everyone paying his taxes. Before the reader can say "Ca ira," the mob is in the streets clamoring for the Fifth Republic, and what happens to King Pippin after that is best left for Author Steinbeck to tell...
Though The Short Reign of Pippin IV (a May co-selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club) is a fable that makes no claims for itself beyond the desire to please, its author waters Aesop with Alsop, mixes persiflage with prescriptions for the ills of modern France. The satiric lapses into the pontifical ("The French are a moral people-judged, that is, by American country-club standards"). Pippin makes a charming king-for-a-day, but the joke goes on for so long that those who come to laugh may stay to yawn. Hélas, political reality...