Word: sportif
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first reached Saigon with a small OSS detachment in August 1945. For a few weeks, the city lived in the euphoria of liberation from the Japanese. Saigon's Cercle Sportif bubbled with the dansant in the hot evenings. Ladies fashioned new gowns from their liberators' parachutes. The Vietnamese seemed happy, justly proud that they had fought the Japanese while their French overlords capitulated. The exhilaration faded when French troops began reoccupying their old garrisons in September and a French high commissioner arrived proclaiming that he had "not come out from France to turn Indochina over to the Indochinese...
...dreamlike, life went on in many parts of the city as though the North Vietnamese divisions were hundreds of miles away. Banners still proclaimed military victories in the province of Long Khanh ("a big cemetery of the North Vietnamese aggressors"), although the region was lost. At the fashionable Cercle Sportif Francais, center of the social life of the wealthy Saigonese, champagne was served as usual beside the greenlined swimming pool. At the Club Nautique de Saigon, racing shells got another coat of varnish, as though the joys of summer would never end. The front gate of the My Canh restaurant...
...first rocket of the day fell on the fruit market and killed seven people. The second fell 30 meters from the tennis courts at the Cercle Sportif and thereafter, for once, the courts remained unused. Four hours later the bombshell hit: a 107-mm. rocket slammed into a crowded street in front of the Monerom Hotel, killing eleven people instantly and maiming a dozen more; a flaming Honda was catapulted onto a pedicab whose lone occupant was already dead...
...Daytime tennis at the Cercle Sportif Cambodge is accompanied by the very audible chatter of 20-mm. machine guns. Bars serving Westerners function well beyond the 9 o'clock curfew when the streets become completely empty. It is hard to believe that just 15 miles down the Mekong, the war in Cambodia smolders on, an ever more bloody stalemate with no end yet in sight...
...which cost $2,000 and up -mean anything to ordinary clothes buyers? Certainly not to the faded-denim and corduroy set; and very little to devotees of sportswear, still the most popular look by far among U.S. women. The couturiers almost self-consciously shied away from anything resembling sportif, the lines that in the past have been most successfully "knocked off' by ready-to-wear imitators...