Word: stroud
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...preacher's son from Shelbyville. Mo., who dropped out of the University of Missouri after a year to be a nightclub master of ceremonies in St. Louis. But at 20 he changed his mind, took over a dilapidated little church in Stroud. Okla., and made up his college work at the same time, graduating cum laude from the University of Tulsa in 1939. After two years of graduate work at the University of Chicago and a year as pastor in Los Angeles, he was ready to move in on oil-rich Oklahoma City...
...nearness of death seems to have had a therapeutic effect on Prisoner Stroud, then 30. Condemned to spend the rest of his life in prison, he made his solitary-confinement cell into a laboratory and himself into a major authority on bird diseases. His story, a wildly improbable triumph of will and intelligence, is compellingly told by Author Gaddis, a California social worker...
...Stroud found a nest of newborn sparrows in a prison yard, took them to his lonely cell. The experience of taking care of the birds moved him, and he decided he would like to raise canaries. He painstakingly built a cage out of a soap box, using a razor blade and pieces of bottle glass as tools. Although he had gone to school only as far as the third grade, he now absorbed all that prison libraries could teach him about chemistry, biology, ornithology. Displaying heroic patience, he carried out thousands of experiments with homemade apparatus, found remedies for major...
...Though Stroud was eligible for parole in 1936, he stayed behind bars. The reason, apparently, was that proud and querulous Robert Stroud often got prison bureaucrats sorely annoyed at him by insisting on his right to carry on scientific work in his cell. In 1942, exasperated officials put a halt to his researches: they sent him, in handcuffs and leg irons, from Leavenworth to tougher Alcatraz. He is there now, aged 65, still in solitary confinement. He has spent more time in solitary-39 years-than any other federal prisoner in U.S. history...
Birdman of Alcatraz crackles with Author Gaddis' anger at those who helped Robert Stroud set that record. But the book's great merit is that, rather than pity and indignation, it stirs admiration for a fantastic human achievement...