Word: starching
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Reubin Askew, a straight-arrow Democrat, took the starch out of Florida's rumbustious Governor Claude Kirk: "Government by antics," Askew cried, and 57% of the voters agreed. Askew is a refreshingly different newcomer to politics: a Presbyterian elder and a nonsmoking teetotaler who once said his favorite hobby is going to church. Kirk had managed to split the Republicans by pushing Judge G. Harrold Carswell into the U.S. Senate primary against Representative William Cramer...
Kremlin Scholar. Even as he moves to take some of the starch out of Navy life, Zumwalt has also taken charge of modernizing its forces to meet its traditional missions. He does not like the Administration's insistence that the fleet be cut by about 30% (from roughly 900 to 600 ships); but if it must be done, he wants to decide how to do it. A former director of the Pentagon's Naval Operations Systems Analysis Group, he was selected to argue with former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's computer-conscious experts in their own language...
...Buddha. It was around 1963 that Unruh began to redefine himself. After a political cartoon pictured him as a fat Buddha, he abruptly cut out starch and Scotch and in four months took off 100 Ibs. The effort was a good example of his will. A stutterer as a boy, he overcame his affliction by forcing himself to deliver class talks and joining the debating team. In 1959, when he saw a picture of himself puffing a cigar like Boss Tweed, he stopped smoking on the spot. Until last year, he spoke with a lisp; he had that corrected...
...started, recalls Designer Charles Prior Hall, with an "incredibly horrible thing" in his apartment. "I built a chair that was 300 lbs. of liquid starch encased in a vinyl skin. You would sit in this thing and it would creep up around you." The Incredible Creeping Chair, as Hall called it, failed to make the impact that he hoped for. But his efforts to improve it led him to a much splashier creation, which is now making an appearance-and creating a sensation -in department stores across the nation. It is the water bed, the bounciest bedroom invention since...
Initially, Hall's concept was simple -the creation of "a mass in a room that would mold itself to you." Translating the idea into reality was more complicated. After starch proved unworkable, he tried JellO, but found it had a tendency to decompose. Reverting to simplicity, he hit upon the idea of using masses filled with water. In his first experiments, he used only cold water, but found that he "woke up with my bottom feeling like ice." A radiant-heat unit solved that problem, and after Hall spent 18 months trying to interest manufacturers and dealers...