Word: stu
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Stuart Symington's will to victory traces back to a special kind of poverty that he endured in childhood-not the numbing poverty of the slum poor but the stinging poverty of the semi-broke genteel. At the time of Stu's birth, his father was a teacher of Romance languages at Massachusetts' Amherst College. But he soon quit as a result of a quarrel with the college president, moved his family to New York, where he studied law at night, scraping a living by translating documents for export-import firms. A few years later, the family...
Even after ex-Professor Symington started making money, at law and in business ventures, the flow was erratic. To supplement the family income during lean spells, young Stu got a paper route. One summer he sold bottled spring water from a wagon pulled by his dog. At eleven he attended his first presidential nominating convention-the historic, tumultuous Baltimore Democratic Convention that nominated Woodrow Wilson in 1912-as a vendor of peanuts, popcorn, tobacco and chewing...
...name to W. Stuart Symington as a businessman, dropped the W. when he got into politics) was an "extravagantly beautiful" child, recalls his doting sister Louise. Absorbing the household's bookish atmosphere-adorning the mantle was a Latin motto that translates as "Life without literature is death"-little Stu read so avidly that the family called him "the professor." As his Christmas present when he was ten, he asked for and got a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...
Early in life, Stu manifested the luck that was to stay with him over the years. He totally escaped the eye affliction, deterioration of the retina, that has given all three of his brothers faint vision. While playing tag in the framework of an unfinished house at age 9, he fell two stories to the concrete foundation, suffered nothing worse than a fractured and permanently stiffened left elbow. A natural southpaw, he had to learn to write with his right hand; but he played left-handed tennis well enough to star on his high school team and make the varsity...
...Stu was especially lucky at wooing. At a charity ball during his sophomore year at Yale, he was stricken by the blue eyes and golden hair of pretty Evelyn Wadsworth, daughter of New York's wealthy Republican Senator (1915-27) James Wadsworth, granddaughter of Secretary of State (1898-1905) John Hay, great-granddaughter of General James Samuel Wadsworth, whose First Division held heroically firm on Gulp's Hill during the Battle of Gettysburg (where Symington's grandfather, William Stuart Symington I, fought on the Confederate side as a youthful captain...