Word: bootblack
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...reform. They bring contributions to the Agrarian Reform Institute, everything from pennies to axheads to old barbed wire. "I am in accord with Fidel." says Juan Mora, who owns 17 acres, a thatched hut, a cow and a pig. "I am going to register for more land." Chimes in Bootblack Ruiz Marino Arganza, 16: "Everybody for Fidel...
...House office staff (salary: $4,000 a year) who had been eased onto the payroll by Pennsylvania's late, sympathetic Democrat Herman Eberharter. With little ado, the committee decided that the nation could henceforth do without the services of brassy John Maragon, 65, onetime Kansas City bootblack, who connived his way to a reputation as one of the Truman era's sleaziest five-percenters...
Died. Joe Bologna, 79, little (5 ft. 1 in.) king of the Wall Street bootblacks; of a heart attack; in Brooklyn. In 1896, 18-year-old Giuseppe Bologna left Castel-grande in Italy's southern Apennines, began shining shoes in Manhattan, where bootblacks worked a 15-hr. day and the top ones earned $4 a week. By 1902 Joe had returned to Italy, married, and was back in New York living with his wife and daughter in a $7-a-month apartment on a family food budget of 25? a day. Joe knelt at the feet of bank presidents...
From his unofficial throne atop the bootblack stand in the New York County Courthouse, Tammany Sachem George Washington Plunkitt (1842-1924) used to extol the virtues of Tammany Hall. He gloried in the durability of the city machine that went on "flourishin' forever, like fine old oaks. Say, that's the first poetry I ever worked off. Ain't it great...
...from the beginning of the republic (1931) to the present. Cypresses covers the first five years of political unrest, ends twelve days after the beginning of civil war. Gironella tries to mirror every segment of Spanish society, from wild-eyed anarchists to stuffy professors, "from the bishop to the bootblack." The novel's hero, if it has one, is Ignacio, ison of a poor but intelligent civil servant. His mother is a devout Catholic, his brother a saintly boy headed for the priesthood. Ignacio's dilemma is that he likes to see things whole, can swallow neither...