Word: whitcombes
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Senator Fulbright's comments on morality in the U.S. [TIME, April 9] reminded me of a couplet from James Whitcomb Riley...
...reporting a court-martial conviction last year, the Army's Stars & Stripes in Germany made what seemed a small mistake: it got the accused's middle initial wrong. The accused was Lieut. Colonel Richard F. Whitcomb, convicted of looting a requisitioned house in Germany (his conviction was later reversed). But in getting the story over the phone, Stars & Stripes put down Whitcomb's initial as "S." From that point on, the mistake grew to impressive proportions...
...Associated Press put the story on the wire with the additional information (obtained from the Army) that Whitcomb's home town was Worcester, Mass., near Boston. Boston papers dug into their morgues to see what they had on Richard S. Whitcomb. They had plenty. He had been general sales manager of the 'telephone company in Boston, candidate for the Republican nomination for governor in 1938, and a colonel in World War II. There was one discrepancy: his home town was Longmeadow, a suburb of Springfield, and not Worcester...
...Monday afternoon, a few hours before TIME'S April 3 issue went to bed, Researcher Marjorie Burns put in a fast phone call for Ed Heinke, our Indianapolis string correspondent. She told him that a story in Education referred to a poem by James Whitcomb Riley entitled Perfesser John Clark Ridpath, A.M., LL.D., TYTY. What, asked Researcher Burns, did the T-Y-T-Y stand for? Could Heinke find out? Possibly somebody at DePauw University, where Lecturer Ridpath lived and worked before his death in 1900, would know...
...Others: "Professor" Friedrich Bhaer, who married one of Louisa M. Alcott's Little Women; James Whitcomb Riley's "Perfesser John Clark Ridpath, A.M., LL.D., T-Y-TY." The TYTY was a bit of Riley humor. Since schoolchildren used to spell by syllable (e.g., PURITY, p-u-r-PUR; iI; t-y-TY), the alphabet after the "perfesser's" name brought forth from Riley the old classroom response...