Word: broken-down
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...best picture, Going My Way, drew Oscars for Best Actor Bing Crosby, double-threat star of radio and cinema (see RADIO), for Barry Fitzgerald as best supporting actor, and twice-Oscared Leo McCarey, for best directing and authoring the best original story. Lauding McCarey for helping "a broken-down crooner ... to win," Actor Crosby quipped: "Now if he'd find me a horse to win the Kentucky Derby, it would be the greatest parlay in history." Also be-Oscared: Ethel Barrymore, best supporting actress (None but the Lonely Heart); Margaret O'Brien, best child actress. Wartime note: Oscars...
When the mayor of Carvell City drove up, Cancy Dodd was sprawled on his broken-down porch staring glumly at his scrubby farmland and thinking about his hidden still and the two men he had once killed "in self-defense." Cancy was Carvell City's toughest Negro-hater. But his eyes popped when His Honor boomed: "We're looking for a new marshal. . . . Somebody who'll keep the niggers in their place." "When do you want me?" said Cancy...
...preach her own brand of fundamental ist salvation, which she called the Four-square Gospel. On street corners and under canvas she preached, from Maine to Florida and from coast to coast. Tired of wandering at last, in 1918 she loaded her mother and her children into a broken-down jalopy and headed for Los Angeles...
White-haired, Illinois-born Railroader Sprague came up the hard way: callboy telegrapher, machinist's apprentice, fireman, etc. After he had gone back to railroading, and had been promoted a few times, he picked up a new hobby: training race horses, particularly has-beens. Year after year his broken-down nags won purses for him (one big grey won 16 out of 20 races, after Sprague bought him for $175, pulled a tooth that had made him "outlaw" when the bit touched...
When Lucian Sprague took over the broken-down M. & St. L. in 1935, his desk was strewn with $424,000 in current bills, a $254,000 payroll was due in two weeks, $46,000,000 worth of bonds had been in default since 1922-and there was only $103,000 in the bank. He had to sell some of his battered boxcars for scrap to get enough cash to repair his rotten rails. But he got every discouraged M. & St. L. employe to help him sell people on "The Peoria Gateway," amazed potential customers by helping them sell their...