Word: robber
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...turn-of-the-century U.S. was ripe for satire, and Dunne missed few opportunities. The U.S. had developed imperial pretensions. There were "robber barons" and muckrakers, Prohibitionists and faith healers. Mr. Dooley matched wits with the mighty, and he usually put them down. One of the mightiest was Theodore Roosevelt, whose name Mr. Dooley always managed to mispronounce. "Whin Thaydore Rosenfelt kisses a baby," Mr. Dooley told his pal Hinissy, "thousands iv mothers in all corners of th' land hear th' report an' th' baby knows its been kissed an' bears...
...right there and then ended the efficiency of the caper that would have gone down in history as the nation's greatest jewel robbery. For the hopeless fact was that the robber who was designated as the "wheel man"-the "cop" assigned to drive off with the boodle-the excruciatingly exasperated hood with a huge fortune in his grasp-the sad simpleton upon whom everything depended-couldn't drive a 1951 Ford...
Bewildered by a foot clutch, a manual stick shift and a tricky choke, the robber flooded the engine. The car lurched and died. He started it again, and again the Ford coughed and pooped out. The driver, desperate, looked across the street. There stood a group of demolition workers who had been tearing down an old slaughterhouse. They now became the central figures in a modern morality play...
West Side cynics scornfully pointed out that any robber who couldn't handle a stick shift deserved his ignominy. Not so the workers who looted the car. Who, it was asked, wouldn't have done the same? But what of the looters who looted the looters? They, alas, are among the dishonored...
...often feel they have traveled by Time Machine back to an earlier America. So many Filipinos tote pistols that nightclubs, restaurants, government buildings and even the Philippine Air Lines insist in true Western style that customers check their firearms at the entrance. Prosperous Filipino business men, like the U.S. robber barons of the 1890s, build ornate homes in Manila's luxurious suburb of Forbes Park, where special police with carbines guard the streets against tough intruders from the slums. Bandits roam the back country, and pirates aboard motor launches raid docks and fishing boats...