Word: bleakness
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DURING the bleak years of the Great Depression, millions of U.S. families learned to rule their lives by the household budget, religiously parceling out set amounts for all needs, from mortgage payments to shoe-shines. Many families divided their income into envelopes firmly labeled Rent, Food, Electricity, etc.; others made ends meet by keeping a strict household ledger of every penny earned, every penny spent. But as the U.S. economy burgeoned, the rigid family budget began to die out. In the midst of prosperous 1955, a manager of Home Life Insurance Co. estimates that only one of 200 families keeps...
...portent of worse shocks to come. If he wins the election in November (which seems likely), Chandler will almost certainly throw out the supporters of Senator Earle Clements and found his own political dynasty. And, with the end of his machine at hand, Boss Clements' own future looks bleak: during the campaign Happy repeatedly swore to end Clements' career in Washington if he won the governorship. But in the flush of victory last week, Happy took it all back. "That was all made in the heat of the campaign," he said. Hardly anyone-least of all Earle Clements...
Their strange political journeyings had deep roots. All three were born to the bleak Depression South. Their families were poor, their lives unhappy, their world warped. Bell's father bragged that "I could always scare him into anything"; Griggs ran away, eventually joined the Army because of a school-bus teasing about a girl friend. Bell spent three years in the eighth grade; when Cowart wrote a Communist-line letter from the Communist prison camp about McCarthyism and McCarranism. one of his teachers said: "How much it would have gratified us when he was in school to have known...
...opera is a daring work from many points of view: it has no plot, but consists of a series of gloom-ridden episodes, recollections, even a bleak little prison play in pantomime; 16 of its 17 singing roles are men; it contains a minimum of tunes and some very strange harmonic goings-on indeed. And yet it is a strong work from overture to the final hymn to freedom, and is even gripping in three long narratives by the prisoners against a background of unnerving orchestral fantasy. Over all hangs an eerie, Kafka-like haze that results partly from...
...Johns Hopkins, worked for a while as a pathologist in Panama shortly after the start of William Gorgas' antimalaria campaign; after serving as a professor at the University of California, he went to Rochester in 1921 as head of a school that was still only a bleak patch of earth. An awesome but beloved figure ("When he comes into a classroom,'' a student once said, "the silence is deafening"), he built up two great hospitals, a school of nursing, clinics for cerebral palsy and psychiatry, turned Rochester into one of the top medical centers in the nation...