Word: suburbanity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...effect upon such a bedroom community, with its $35,000 Spanish-style houses and stucco split-levels, has been a weird suburban anxiety. Twelve families living along Wright Avenue have killed 27 rattlers so far this year, and as one housewife said, "It's hardly even summer." One man found a snake coiled on the front seat of his car. The snakes slither across manicured lawns, nest in the coolness of garages and patios. Reid Waddell, a 42-year-old butcher, bent down to pick up his evening paper and saw a rattler side-winding across his driveway...
Three-year-old Melody McGuire ran into the kitchen screaming that there was "a big worm" in her sandbox. Children are taught to play cautiously-if they are allowed outside at all. The suburban routine for housewives now includes decapitating rattlers with a shovel. Melody's parents have killed 18 of them since the family moved to Pinole in 1968. At least one husband keeps a .22-cal. rifle ready in his closet...
Apart from the physical danger they present, the snakes have caused a sense of civic humiliation. Like most suburban communities, Pinole hopes to grow, and Mayor Donald E. Tormey fears that the snakes are driving away new residents. No one speaks for the snakes, who owned Pinole in the first place, and may simply be having their vengeance upon the bulldozer...
...unspectacular ways, however, Ted Heath had shrewdly anticipated an early election. Last January he called his Shadow Cabinet into a closed session at suburban Croydon's Selsdon Park Hotel, where he and his colleagues batted out a new party platform. At that time Heath, who is an excellent administrator, declared that the party organization should be geared up for a possible June election. It was. The Tories are nothing if not good managers and good disciplinarians. In every department of Abbey House, their central office in Westminster's Smith Square, methods and systems were tightened. Throughout the regions, new party...
...older generation is afraid, and more sadly, why it is resentful of those who seem to have everything but gratitude. To both young and old, we are almost invisible. The young often see us as the cop-outs-as the shorthaired, button-down junior exec or the suburban housewife in a station wagon -and many of us are. Our parents and older brothers and sisters often see us as the fellow travelers of the youthful enemy, which many...