Word: samplers
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Rolling into New York state last week, Harry Truman wound up two weeks of whistle-stopping during which he had done his demagogic best to insure that Dwight Eisenhower should not get the presidency in 1952. A sampler of Tru-manisms...
Mercury associate, Charles Angoff, has reached back over 34 years, dusted off Nathan's personal Five-Foot Shelf of writings (some 39 books) and pieced together a Nathan sampler. Sipped, The World of George Jean Nathan is a delight; swallowed, it leaves a faintly rusty taste on the palate, like water too long in the taps. With malice toward some, Nathan has his say on every subject under his sun. Examples...
...gleaming marble corridors. In the dead of night last week, Honor Guard Corporal Linwood C. Smith, a Purple Heart veteran of nine months in Korea, took a ten-minute break, wandered into Ridgway's outer office. There he saw a box of Whitman's Sampler chocolates. Knowingly and willfully, Corporal Smith did then & there remove and eat five pieces of candy-four nougats and one mint-and he gave four more pieces to two other Honor Guards, Pfcs. John King and Herbert Branch...
...Church found that measuring the depth of the snow was not enough. Some snow is light and fluffy, with little water in it. Other snow is tightly packed, almost like solid ice. So he invented his "snow sampler": a metal tube to be driven into the snow. By measuring the weight of the snow in the sampler, he could figure the amount of water that the snow would yield when it melted. The professor's simple instrument, invented more than 40 years ago, is still used all over the world. Power companies and other water users no longer have...
Unhappily, the cheery peace of this literary sampler is broken by a scarlet thread that runs wild through it all. William Cowper was a madman. He spent every moment of his last 25 years under the delusion that God hated him personally. Worse yet, Cowper's God was irrevocably determined to betray him at every turn in this life, and to torture him eternally in the next. Under this ghastly sentence, Cowper wretchedly took up, as he said, "the arduous task of being merry by force." He found temporary oblivion in lighthearted verse and in thousands of eloquent, cheerful...