Word: small-town
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When Hart left Ottawa to go to Oklahoma's Bethany Nazarene College at the age of 18, he was shy, serious and determined to leave the small-town boy behind. Over the years, he changed his name from Hartpence to Hart, changed his age to make himself a year younger, changed his signature, became a movie buff and began drinking margaritas (in moderation). His circle of friends broadened from Duane Hoobing to Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine. An antiwar activist in the late '60s, he obtained a commission in the Naval Reserve...
...that Hart could turn the age-change issue into a joke simply by beginning a speech with a statement of fact and then, after pausing a beat, adding, "I'm as certain of that as I am of my own age." Hart's arduous climb from restless small-town boy to presidential contender has sharpened and toughened him. The campaign will test whether his steely cool is well tempered, or too brittle. -By Evan Thomas. Reported by Hays Gorey/Washington and Jack E. White with Hart
Hart's father was a farm-equipment salesman, his mother a Sunday-school teacher. At age ten, says Uncle Ralph Hartpence, "Gary could talk to adults and make sense." His boyhood was wholesome and placid: small-town Kansas just before rock 'n' roll, lazy evening drives up and down Main Street, hanging out at the Dairy Queen with Best Pal Duane Hoobing or reading at the library. "He was good-looking and could have been very popular," says Hoobing, who teaches citizenship at a junior high school not far from Ottawa, "but he wouldn't pursue...
...irreverent editorial policy and his publicly stated wish to be intellectually independent of the magazine's backers, the Mac Arthur Foundation, lead to a series of publicized run-ins with John MacArthur. Harper's President and Publisher Mac Arthur was looking "for a more Saturday Review-type audience, small-town school teachers who bemoan the fact that nobody writes letters anymore, says a former Harper's writer, Timothy Noah '80. Kinsley left last summer and moved to Washington to become a senior editor at The New Republic...
...their birthplace in Abruzzi, revives the defunct town symphony as a tourist attraction. Francesco's desperation for the job is the more comically visible, and his wife (Giuliana De Sio) tries to advance his cause by sleeping with a town councilor. Less obviously needy, Andrea pursues the job with a worldly resignation that contrasts to good dramatic effect with his rival's cookie-tossing eagerness for it. Luciano Odorisio's Dear Maestro is not much to look at, but it is shrewd in its examination of how envious small-town gossip exacerbates a contest that neither participant...