Word: gingerbread
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...focused national attention upon the capital and its miserable estate. Arose Alexander R. Sheppard, great public spirit, great builder, to pave and light streets, lay sewers, plant trees, pauperize himself. Washington grew out of its youthful squalor, but recklessly, without unity or good taste. Architecture went on a gingerbread spree?viz. the State, War & Navy Building, the Post Office Department Building. The L'Enfant plan was forgotten...
...Gretel, a wee child with pigtails stiff as taffy sticks. Editha Fleisher was Hansel, just ragged and happy. There was a real witch with matted gray hair and a nose like a spigot who rode on her broomstick way into the sky and ate little children. There was a gingerbread house and a red-hot oven where plop ended the witch pushed by wee Gretel just too stupid to get in herself. "Hocus pocus. . . ." Children loved it. So did grown-ups who quite forgot the tawdry Violanta of early afternoon...
...Uncle Timothy's rawhide "whangs" (shoe-laces). Bronson Alcott hit the road with tinware and almanacs instead of going to Yale. Worcester Polytechnic Institute was founded by John Boynton, onetime pack-peddler. The original soap Babbitt peddled razor strops. Benedict Arnold took woolens into Canada. Cherry rum, gingerbread and candy were the stock in trade of Phineas T. Barnum before, aged 25, he bought "161-year-old" Joyce Heth, "George Washington's nurse," and turned showman. Purloining a sheaf of his father's sermons, the notorious Stephen Burroughs tramped to one empty pulpit after another...
...eating, he would go for some particular article (as meat, gingerbread) and make a meal of it exclusively...
Back in the era of good Queen Victoria, there was really only one place to live in Chicago-and that was on the South Side. New York had its brownstone fronts and Fifth Avenue chateaux, but Chicago had only its sprawling gingerbread Gothic and its Prairie Avenue. Sooty railroads, industry, and worst of all, the "black belt" began to creep up to the gingerbread creations. Society surrendered. It began an exodus to the North Side -to Lake Shore Drive, Astor Street, Sheridan Road, Lake Forest. Not so, Julius Rosenwald-he would stand by the South Side. He did not object...