Word: bookworm
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Even Cook. Throughout his career, Van Doren has been so well-rounded that none of his friends ever regarded him as a bookworm. He plays good squash and tennis, won a $60-a-month athletic scholarship at St. John's to coach intramural basketball and baseball, played extracurricular bridge and pool. As a World War II pre-aviation cadet whose initials doomed him to the nickname "V.D.," he became adept at poker. Pooling resources with a buddy named Laural Whipkey, now an advertising man in West Virginia, Corporal Van Doren played poker twelve hours...
During his 36 years as a book manufacturer, President Sidney Satenstein of the American Book-Stratford Press, Inc. has been doing his best to persuade more Americans to read. In 1930 he put Alexander Woollcott on the radio as "The Early Bookworm." The program flopped ("Didn't sell a book"), and so did Satenstein's radio efforts with Reviewers Harry Hansen and Clifton Fadiman. Gradually, Satenstein decided that chasing after adults was largely a waste of time. "You've got to get to the children," says he. "The thing to sell is the reading habit early...
Delayed Degree. When Sigmund was four, the family moved to Vienna. A bookworm, he graduated from high school summa cum laude at 17. It was then the fashion in polite strata of most European society to lock sex in a darkened bedroom and pretend that otherwise (except for haut-monde libertines and the licentious "lower classes") it did not exist. For whatever inner need, the adolescent Freud accepted this viewpoint, once even warned his sister Anna off Balzac and Dumas...
Horace on Half a Dollar. When Paul was 13, the Stapps decided that it was time their oldest boy became an American, and he was enrolled in the San Marcos Baptist Academy in Texas. Young Paul, slight, nearsighted and a bookworm, found San Marcos a school for "displaced hellions." The San Marcos kids lost no time in taking him apart, but he had enough energy left to join the school band and play the bassoon...
...E.D.T.; sponsor: Plymouth). Dad, as portrayed by spade-jawed Supper Club Comic Eddie Mayehoff, is a middleaged, nine-letter man out of old Rossmore U. whose driving passion is to make a he-man out of his skinny son, a 17-year-old bookworm who gets his exercise by reading without his glasses...