Word: taciturn
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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RETIRED. William J. Obanhein, 60, tough, taciturn police officer in his native Stock-bridge, Mass., made reluctantly famous when he arrested visiting Folk Singer Arlo Guthrie for littering on Thanksgiving Day 1965, thereby becoming the heavy, "Officer Obie," in Guthrie's talking blues epic, Alice's Restaurant, and in the 1969 hit film in which each played himself; from his position as chief after 34 years on the force because, he said, of his frustration with the courts and smalltown politics; in Stockbridge. Obie and Guthrie, a resident of nearby Washington, Mass., became friends after the clash over trash...
Common sense had prevailed. Said Tutu with a twinkle in his eye: "I have always believed people to be saints until they proved themselves rogues." The colonel was more taciturn. "No comment" was all he could muster...
...yarn-spinning champion of St. Paul, Minn., "the storyteller in our family was uncle Lew Powell, who was my great uncle, my grandma's brother, who died only a couple of years ago, at the age of 93. In a family that tended to be a little withdrawn, taciturn, my uncle Lew was the friendliest. He had been a salesman, and he liked to drive around and drop in on people. He would converse, ask how we were doing in school, but there would be a point when he would get launched, and we would try to launch him. There...
...hide his distaste at the prospect of sitting down with Palestinian leaders. "All of them are from Sodom," Sharon told a friend. "But we'll have to deal with someone after Arafat." Sharon decided to place his bets on the secretary-general of the P.L.O.'s executive committee, a taciturn moderate named Mahmoud Abbas. Sharon invited Abbas to Sycamores Farm, his 600-hectare ranch in the Negev Desert. If Abbas were ever to replace Arafat, Sharon later concluded, he was a man Israel could do business with. That expectation is about to be put to the test. Seven years after...
Nevada senator Harry Reid's capitol office is decorated--incongruously, given his taciturn demeanor--with large portraits of two fabulously flamboyant Americans, Andrew Jackson and Mark Twain. The Jackson portrait is dynamic, wind whipped, but slightly obligatory. Old Hickory, the first President who was not an aristocrat, was the brawling founder of the modern Democratic Party, and Reid, newly elected Senate minority leader, is now the highest-ranking Democrat in Washington...