Word: bootblack
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Things were considerably worse at the Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, where, it is reported, Mrs. Siy, the early-shift char, came in to find a femur of the long-jawed dactyl bearing the legend: "Lamarck was here." At the Jefferson Physic Laboratory, a freckle-faced bootblack was captured brining a candle at both ends and rapidly making calculations...
...indeterminable-hued divan has sustained the weight of the wearer of the blackest, thickest-rimmed glasses among Cambridge cognoscenti. It has also supported innumerable bodies beneath as many heads holding rimless spectacles, prime among these being Cairnie himself. For sitting comfort, the Grolier ottoman is approached only by the bootblack stand at Felix's Shoe Shine Spa, and there the conversation hardly runs beyond static monosyllables in praise of one Williams, a baseball player from San Diego...
Horatio's hero is always a prince in disguise, playing the part of a fiddler, a bootblack, a hired boy, but with at tractive, cheerful and resolute features under the dirt. His mother, always a widow, is tormented by the village squire, who plays the joint role of Penelope's suitors. The hero meets a stranger and rescues his child from drowning (or from a mad dog or a runaway horse). The stranger turns out to be a rich merchant, who gives the boy new clothes, then sends him on a mission, a sort of knightly quest...
Ragged Dick, the second of the four novels now reprinted, was the first of Alger's books (1868) to reach a wide public. It is a moral but lively story dealing with the rise to respectability of a homeless bootblack...
Onward with the Arts. Basis of its gaudy plot was that as a beginner in the ring Beau Jack, the illiterate former Augusta Golf Club bootblack, had once sparred with Armstrong. Master Armstrong proposed to give Pupil Jack another boxing lesson. Purred Armstrong: "I can't forget the look of ... adoration in his eyes when he [first] saw me. . . . Just like my little daughter...