Word: wizard
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History and legend have both been unkind. Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier wrote of "painful Kelpius . . . maddest of good men . . . weird as a wizard, over arts forbid." But before the day when he died in his garden at only 35, Kelpius had succeeded in giving his followers something of his vision of a life sustained in its every moment by communion with...
...industry let out a howl of anguish four years ago when General Motors' research wizard, Charles F. Kettering, announced a revolutionary new auto engine. By using gasoline with a 105-octane rating, Kettering's high-compression engine could get 30 miles to the gallon. Complained oilmen: to provide enough 105-octane gas to make such a revolution practical would require a $2 billion rebuilding of their whole refining equipment...
...work 13 years ago to drive the Ku Klux Klan out of Georgia. The Constitution repeatedly headlined hooded assault and fiery cross burnings, prodded lethargic cops into jailing several of the ringleaders, kept up a constant drumfire of ridicule. When Indiana Veterinarian James A. Colescott was chosen Imperial Wizard of the Klan, Editor McGill wrote: "For the first time the Klan has chosen a proper man, a veterinarian skilled in dealing with dumb animals...
Plots to William Shakespeare were as pots to a busy wizard-any old tub, begged, borrowed or stolen, would do to mix the magic in. In The Tempest, for instance, the plot is the tired old story about a nobleman, bilked of his estates, who takes refuge on a distant island, and mild revenge on his enemies when they are shipwrecked there. Yet in this common vessel, Shakespeare stirred a wizard's brew of steaming language and the rich juice of 30 years' experience; the mixture mulled, at the last stir of the action, into a fine philosophical...
...grizzled old Buddhist Wizard of Kalimpong specializes in freeing the struggling spirits of the dying. This he accomplishes by sticking a hollow tube down the dying man's throat to provide a spiritual exit; at the same time the Wizard toots a horn made of a human thigh bone. The Wizard might be thought eccentric elsewhere, but not in Kalimpong (pop. 8,800), a zany Indian town straddling a 4,000-foot ridge in the Himalayan foothills...