Word: totem
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Swamis with Sidelines. H. Hatterr, Desani's comic hero, is a born stooge and fall guy. Born illegitimate, "a love-brat, a mixed Oriental-Occidental sinfant," Hero Hatterr endures a series of misadventures which keep him low man on life's totem pole...
...compare a prosperous bond-salesman of the American species with an Arunta tribesman is in the sociological sense by no means derogatory. Totems are as fundamental as anything in the curious network of superstitions, contracts, and shibboleths which arise from the social intermingling of individuals. The totem in both cases rests on a fairly common basis, a kindred, actual or supposed, and its manifestations, its parades and its war cries, are equally noble or ridiculous...
...space. It is related also to those objects in our modern landscape, like antennae, which make the quickest communication with all points of the earth; and it is based on the steel technology of our time as surely as were the pyramids in the age of stone, or totem poles in a culture of wood construction. The shining radiance of the steel and the upward-growing forms are full of hope and faith...
What the annual Boston-Syracuse football game needed for greater class, a special B.U. committee had decided, was a nice trophy-something like the Michigan-Minnesota little brown jug or the Indiana-Purdue old oaken bucket. The committee considered and discarded the notion of a totem pole or a big bass drum. Finally someone suggested an oldtime Boston bean pot. Bright B.U. Publicity-man George Wood took over from there...
Regarding your Sept. 11 article on Bob Prescott and his Flying Tiger Line, wherein you state he painted one of his C-47s like a totem pole and flew a "fanciful" Texan and eight friends to Vancouver, B.C. for a weekend...