Word: runyon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Friday, postal workers in the nation's capital were ordered to work overtime on the weekend to clear the backlog of mail. Just two years ago, Postmaster General Marvin Runyon promised to turn the district's postal service into a "showpiece" of modern technology and efficiency. Yet, in a recent survey by the accounting firm Price Waterhouse, Washington ranked dead last among urban areas for on-time mail delivery. Several members of Congress -- angry because some of the delayed letters in Washington could be from constituents trying to contact them -- charge that the mail holdups could be illegal and plan...
District of Columbia delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and two other lawmakers plan to carry out their own, unscientific study. Each will mail about 20 test letters to various destinations to see how long it takes for them to be delivered. Several lawmakers want a more radical approach: ousting Runyon. Maryland Representative Albert Wynn alleges that under Runyon, skilled postal workers have been dismissed to save money and African-American employees have been fired at a disproportionate rate. Says Wynn: "We can no longer allow Runyon to continue to destroy the second largest agency in the Federal Government...
...tourist traps and hip outlets, mom-and-pop shops and name-brand superstores. The goal is not a "themed" simulacrum of honky-tonk diversity but the real thing. Such a splendidly oxymoronic turn: a municipal code for discouraging tastefulness, a quarter-billion dollars spent to conjure a trashy Damon Runyon spirit. The Bizarro-world rules call for, among other things, giant loudspeakers blasting onto the street, commercial signs noticeably out of alignment with their neighbors and virtually no size limit for billboards. "The bigger and noisier," says Stern, "the better...
Known as "Carvin' Marvin" during his tenure as chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Runyon will have his hands full trying to remold the way 750,000 employees handle (and sometimes mishandle) 540 million pieces of mail each day. When legislators set up the Postal Service as a government-sponsored corporation in 1971, they naively predicted an end to taxpayer subsidies. But the last time the service broke even was in 1982; the projected deficit for this year alone is $2 billion...
...Runyon hopes to meet his target with incentives for early retirement, but some layoffs seem unavoidable. Even so, union leaders applauded the fact that Marvin started carvin' from...