Word: polks
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Raffish characters and an offbeat setting can sometimes save a novel. This is what happens in The Fruit Tramp, a warm-hearted little first book about itinerant fruit and vegetable pickers who traipse along with the harvests. The orphaned hero, Polk Watson, leaves a Georgia farm to hit the picker's trail with his Uncle Chunk, a shrewd, garrulous, gallused cracker who proves to the hilt Author Williams' observation that "no picking machine invented can cup and coax a tomato free like the human hand." Polk grows up in a seedy world of depressing boarding houses, trailer camps...
...daughter. Trouble is that Fawny is a born homemaker. Looking at the rich soil around the deserted house she wants them to buy, she exclaims: "Plant you a teacup handle here, next dinnertime you'd cut a set of china." Uncle Chunk has long since warned Polk: "A rolling stone don't gather no mortgages." So off they roll, to the Southwest, to California, wherever a crop is making. Author Williams' world is an inevitable reminder of John Steinbeck's dustbowl refugees in The Grapes of Wrath, but she has incurred no literary debt. Hers...
...Roorback: A defamatory falsehood published for political effect-Webster's. The word comes from a report published in Whig papers on the eve of the 1844 election, attributed to a fictitious Baron Roorback. The report, an unsuccessful attempt to defeat Democratic Candidate (and slaveholder) James K. Polk, charged that a gang of slaves branded with the initials J.K.P. had been seen on their way to Southern markets...
Some dealers, on the other hand, have made hard promotion pay off. By renting color sets at a loss ($1 a day including service) and buying multihued local TV commercials to hymn the "adventure into a rainbow," Chicago's huge Polk Bros, center has sold 1,600 color sets this year -more than any other one-city U.S. retailer. By contrast, another chain has been quietly showing color TV for six months in six Chicago stores, by last week had sold only two sets...
Because of the poverty of the region and the lack of balanced natural resources, the Arab states must undertake a mammouth program of public works, Polk stressed...