Word: shiftlessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Models in Manuscript. Author Wecter brings to life the real models of dozens of people and incidents in Mark Twain's books. Huck Finn was Tom Blankenship, the happy, shiftless son of a ne'er-do-well drunk. Sid Sawyer was modeled after Sam's own brother Henry. "Injun Joe," sometimes known as "Injun Aleck," was a drifter from Oklahoma who, according to rumor, had once "somehow lost his interest" in his mother, and hanged her. There really was a cave downriver from Hannibal, too, and Sam himself was once lost in it with a young lady...
...parents (one has three children). So far, the grown-up prodigies have met none of the dire fates that are often predicted for precocious sprouts: not one has cracked up mentally or got into any serious trouble. Not one has even turned out to be just plain shiftless...
...shiftless cheat with toplofty schemes, Widmark sets out to get control of London wrestling. He crosses up several minor characters and every major one, including his girl (Gene Tierney). Then he crosses himself up. Duped by Widmark, his partner (Wrestler Stanislaus Zbyszko) dies after an agonizingly filmed grudge fight with Wrestler Mike Mazurki. The dead man's avenging son sets the whale city's underworld on Widmark's heels in an overlong, anticlimactic chase...
...Immigrant. The Puerto Rican migrant is neither Puerto Rico's scum, nor its ignorant, nor its shiftless, as he is often pictured. The average immigrant is better educated (six years of school) than the island's average, Columbia found, and almost all of them left jobs in Puerto Rico. Nor is he a peasant. Most come from the island's two biggest cities, San Juan and Ponce...
Come Back, Little Sheba (by William Inge; produced by the Theatre Guild) tells of a couple, married for 20 years, who should never have married at all. Doc had gotten Lola into trouble; afterwards the baby died, and the sexy, good-natured, empty-headed girl turned into a shiftless housewife, her mind on men, her thoughts in the past. Doc wound up not a doctor, but a chiropractor, and (until Alcoholics Anonymous took over) a drunk. His career blighted, his emotions blunted, he half sleepwalks through life. Then, discovering that their college-girl boarder is turning, like Lola, into...