Word: townes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Like Eisenhower and the atomic bomb, Montreal never amounted to much until the Second World War really got going. The power elite of the town consisted largely of Calvinists who combined a shrewd commercial instinct with an outpost gentility that led them to construct large Presbyterian churches and to dress for dinner...
...when the war came, Montreal lost the look of an English island garrison surrounded by a French shanty town. The city grew into a strategic centre for shipping, communications and the military; prosperity returned to the Calvinists, but only at the price of a middle class invasion from which they never really recovered. At war's end, demobilization in Europe brought a huge influx of refugees--not merely the weary Britons looking for a second chance, but also a dynamic hoard of bright-eyed central and east Europeans. The newcomers, adaptable and eager to make good, often had technical skills...
...Home-Town Morals (after Ralls moviegoers traveled 32 miles to Lubbock to see a Brigitte Bardot movie): "They wouldn't be caught dead attending it in Ralls. Rallsites take their movies like they take their liquor-out of town. That way, nobody gets contaminated and all the kids remain vestal virgins...
...rate increase. We don't recall that our favorite grocer knocked himself out explaining when our favorite 46-oz. can of tomato juice jumped from 19? two years ago to 36? as of today. There's nothing prohibitive about $4 a year for a home-town newspaper. That's about 7½ ? a copy. About half our readers loll around coffee shops swilling from four to twelve cups of 10? coffee every day. They shouldn't squawk about paying the price of one cup of coffee for what we work all week to produce...
...since. His new novel, My Fathers and I, is an escape into the past. It is told by a degenerate descendant of proud ancestors who were greatly absurd but greatly revered. The narrator is Edward G. (for Gratiano) Vanbrugh, a seedily broke antique dealer in a shabby English provincial town. His principal stock, symbolically enough, was a menagerie of Staffordshire China figures-shepherdesses, sailors, heroes of the past. As his narrative unfolds, it turns into a gallery of historical portraits redone by a modern caricaturist...