Word: plumber
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...used as a political bribe. "Kids," his letter began, "this [man] says he will lay off for the sum of $2,000, so I know it is lots of guts to ask you, but. . ." The money was raised. At another point "Benson" asked a 53-year-old Canton plumber to get his blood tested. "Grandmother is sick," said Benson over the telephone, "and William and I have given our blood and are about done . . ." He also promised one Sally Onken (a $12,000 investor) a yellow convertible with "foldaway steps just like Margaret Truman...
...Sherman) and nightclub impresario (the Pump Room, the College Inn); of a heart ailment; in Chicago. Hotelman Byfield once defined the perfect hotelman as the "master of opposites. He needs to be a greeter and a bouncer, pious but ribald . . . noted as a connoisseur and competent as a plumber...
...Cells. The gentlemen in Le Monde's offices printed the letter in full and sent a reporter to investigate the letter writer's story. Jean Duval,* the reporter found, was an enrolled Communist. He had been a plumber, but World War I injuries had made him unfit for his trade, and he had gone to work as an unskilled laborer. During the Nazi invasion in World War II he fled Paris, lost all his belongings. Because of bureaucratic technicalities he received none of the allotments for war victims. Le Monde's reporter described Duval's home...
...among their bitter ranks that the Communists win their votes. France's Communist Humanité promptly turned Duval's story into ready political capital. When readers of Le Monde started sending money and gifts to Duval, Humanité snorted: "The workers want no alms . . ." Later it added: "Plumber, take the gifts in money and kind that the grand bourgeois of Le Monde will throw you, then spit in the faces of those people...
Among the letters which continued pouring into Le Monde's office was one from a Rumanian refugee in Paris which pointed a sharp political moral to Duval's story. Wrote he: "If our poor plumber had had the 'happiness' to be born in the U.S.S.R. [and had written such a letter as he wrote to Le Monde], he would not even have had time to say his goodbyes to his numerous family before undertaking the hard, long trip toward the salt mines...