Word: sweetened
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Hollywood hack. The book pretended, with some authority, to be the hard, straight stuff-novelist on the rocks. But Producer Jerry (The Best of Everything) Wald decided that the stuff was too strong for the customers he was after, and he attempted to water the old Fitzgerald down and sweeten it up. The result is one of those long, pale, fruity concoctions that the ladies are supposed to like. In this case, the taste is more than usually questionable. The industry that treated Fitzgerald so badly while he was alive treats him even worse now he is dead...
Earlier Retirement. While only a handful called for a general wage increase (average demand: 12½? or 15? an hour), many a worker wanted to wipe out wage inequities and sweeten fringe benefits...
...public refused to swallow it; most of the famed Italian films of the late '40s won rave reviews but lost money. In this picture, made in 1956, the ablest of the neorealists-Director Vittorio De Sica and Scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, who together produced Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief-sweeten their pill to the public taste. Yet under the sugar-coating of a story of young love, there is still strong medicine: a calmly factual picture of how ordinary working people live in the midst of Rome's (and much of the world's) housing shortage...
...Sweeten the Benefits. When V. (for Vestor) J. Skutt took over the presidency of Mutual in 1949 from the late founder Dr. C. C. Criss, he set about building up-and drastically changing-the company. South Dakota-born Skutt studied law at Omaha's Creighton University, and in 1924 entered Mutual's legal department. When he rose to president, Skutt found that nobody could keep straight the legal name, Mutual Benefit Health and Accident Association, copyrighted a nickname-Mutual of Omaha. He plugged it widely in ads, was delighted when a Buffalo, N.Y. school pupil, asked to identify...
Skutt's flair was for more than public relations. He decided the real way to build up the company was to sweeten the benefits. He did this by making policies noncancellable by the company, writing income-protection policies to cover the whole family, and liberally interpreting the policy clauses in paying claims. In the 40 years before Skutt's presidency Mutual paid out $250 million in claims. In his ten years on the job it has paid out $750 million. The rise in premium income was equally dramatic: $187 million last year, against $77 million...