Word: spartan
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Most of the 1,248 employees around Radio Free Europe's Munich headquarters liked to grumble about the food in the small, spartan cellar cafeteria. Nonetheless, they were irked when without explanation the cafeteria was closed down last month. The union representing RFE's polyglot American, East European exile and German staff went to management to find...
...other giants-Lockheed, Douglas, Boeing. General Dynamics, et al.-are hopeful that the worst is over. Even so, the future promises to be more Spartan than the past. The Government has issued ample warnings that it no longer will doctor ailing firms with contracts just to keep their facilities in shape for an emergency. In the missile age, the fight will be won by what is on the firing line and not, as in the past, by what could come off the assembly line...
...Spartan Standards. The guardsmen's lot has never been an easy one. First formed in 1505 by Pope Julius II. who gave Switzerland the honor of supplying 200 mercenaries as his personal bodyguard, the corps was almost wiped out 22 years later when Holy Roman Emperor Charles V sacked Rome. In a short, vicious fight, 147 Swiss were killed, successfully defending Clement VII. The guard has not fought another major battle, but ever since has set itself such Spartan, fiercely loyal standards that even a U.S. Marine drill instructor might blink...
...first the laborer-teachers do little except work, sleep and eat, while suety muscles harden. Management does them no favors; they do the same work as ordinary laborers and get the same wages. When classes begin, the props are Spartan: a few books, a folding blackboard. Recalls Welfare Worker Dean Bowman, who arrived at the Geco uranium mines in northwestern Ontario four years ago fresh from Ohio's Antioch College: "I was a complete stranger, carrying expensive luggage, who bore all too much resemblance to a run-of-the-mill college boy." Bowman soon developed "calluses over blisters," managed...
...permission to record life in the temple, planned impressive exhibits in the U.S., where enthusiasm for Zen's ego-smashing techniques has become a semi-religious phenomenon (TIME, Feb. 4, 1957 et seg.). Tsuchiya expected to find the temple's 30 pate-shaven novices undergoing the most Spartan life imaginable, for Zen is the harshest branch of Buddhism, and Shofukuji itself has a reputation as one of Zen's most austere temples...