Word: bootblack
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...father and I were driving toward a mail box at the corner of Peachtree and Houston Streets when there came from nearby Pryor Street a roar . . . which sent a sensation of mingled fear and excitement coursing through my body . . . We saw a lame Negro bootblack from Herndon's barber shop pathetically trying to outrun a mob of whites. Less than a hundred yards from us the chase ended. We saw clubs and fists descending to the accompaniment of savage shouting and cursing. Suddenly a voice cried: 'There goes another nigger!' Its work done, the mob went after...
...onetime shoeshine boy died in Brooklyn last week and, by way of mourning, a $2,500 plater named Sunny Al was scratched in the eighth race at Tropical Park that afternoon. The former bootblack was Anthony Aste, 88, founder of the Griffin Manufacturing Co. (the world's largest makers of shoe polish) and owner of the old Ascot Stable. In six decades on the American turf, Sportsman Aste, "the King of the Bootblacks," had made his mark with a colorful personality and many a better horse than Sunny...
...developed Griffin partly with the profits from another beast, named Nasturtium. Bought by Aste as a yearling for $4,300, Nasturtium bloomed into the best two-year-old race horse of 1901. "The bluebloods must have got worried," Aste related with relish, decades later: "A bootblack with a champion!" William C. Whitney, one of that period's great turfmen, wanted to buy Nasturtium. Aste demanded a price then considered outrageous-$50,000-and set a deadline of noon the next Saturday when this offer would be withdrawn...
...breathtaking career, based upon a brilliantly simple innovation made at the age of 19. In Rome and Paris and Madrid and Cairo, men still have their shoes shined standing on the street, one foot up on a box. The posture is not easy for the kneeling bootblack or dignified for his customer. Anthony Aste pioneered with the U.S. gift to shoe-shining: the chair on a raised stand. By enthroning the customer he became "King of the Bootblacks" and a rival to Whitneys...
Professor William James, the famous philosopher, thought up his "Pluralistic Universe" after he took up residence in 1881, in between the visits of various foreign gentlemen whom James, a friendly person, often put up and interviewed. One such fellow arising early on a morning found a bootblack industriously shining his shoes, left outside in the corridor. The visitor attempted to give him a quarter. The shoe-shiner was James, who calmly continued...