Word: staid
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Before he was old enough to vote, William Larimer Mellon decided that he had not been born to sit at a desk. He refused to finish school, was miserable as a shipping clerk. To curb his restlessness, staid Uncle Andrew Mellon assigned him some oil leases that had turned up in the course of some family deals. To them, William added scores of others. He built a refinery and pipeline, surprised his money-wise family by organizing an integrated oil business which he sold to the Rockefellers in 1895 for about twice what it cost...
...Rotarians let them down. Staid, stout and respectable, they ignored the hotspots, loosed not a wolf whistle. Festooned with cameras and shopping bags, they took the funicular to Sugar Loaf mountain, gazed at the Christ of Corcovado, swarmed into the curio shops to buy butterfly trays and carved knickknacks...
...scientists in the Government, already weary of being investigated, checked and rechecked, the Condon case seemed close to the last straw. The staid American Physical Society, of which Condon is a former president, warned that actions like these "will make difficult the collaboration between scientists and the Government on which so much of our future depends." Condon himself asked Senator Bourke Hickenlooper's Joint Atomic Energy Committee to hold its own investigation in the hope of "restoring conditions in which men of intelligence . . . will not be constantly harassed and harried by irresponsible attacks...
Huckster Nietzsche. The 19th Century's Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche made the grade in 20th Century advertising. In the New York Times, John Ward shoe stores led off an ad for a "neither staid nor stuffy" shoe with the Nietzschean quote: "I am not successful at being pompous...
...since Gone With the Wind had booksellers seen anything like it. Out less than two months, it had already sold 200,000 copies. Its publisher, Philadelphia's W. B. Saunders Co., a staid old medical-and-textbook house, kept two presses running steadily to stay abreast of the demand...