Word: bumming
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...bum, Jimmy! Send dat bum back to California...
Dobbs was a U. S. bum whose wits and luck kept him just a step from the gutter in a Mexican seaport town. The oil boom was dwindling, his luck was beginning to go too, when he met two compatriots in like case, and the three of them agreed to pool their resources, go prospecting for gold. Curtin, like Dobbs, was a greenhorn at the business, but luckily Howard was an oldtime prospector. He led them up through the mountains to a godforsaken spot, set them to work panning for gold dust. After many a long, backbreaking month they each...
...process by which Jimmy Savo, son of a Bronx cobbler, worked his way into the world's most impressive theatrical organization was long and disjointed. Twenty years ago he was a burlesque bum. Before that he had been an amateur in direct competition with Joe Cook, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Fanny Brice on Manhattan's lower East Side. In fact, these striplings once refused to appear in an amateur show with Savo because he was so small and forlorn that the audience always applauded him the prize out of pure pity...
...kept a small spot of land, and made fine workmanlike shoes. He ran fourteen miles with a bullet in his groin, eluding a gamekeeper, dismist Luke's offer of assistance scornfully, and died unlacing his boots. Luke's mother, at the beginning of the story threatens to strike the bum-bailiff who has come to eject them from their home and tells him he can thank his damn stars it is the Book of God she is carrying...
...discouraged, Matt had a final quarrel with his wife, a bust-up with the local of his union, and took to the road again. This time it was not so much fun as when he was younger. He wandered all over the country, taking any job he could get, bumming most of the time, gradually completing his education. Once, with another desperate bum, he held up a gas station, an A. & P. store. But Matt did not become a criminal: adversity and its pals taught him radical economics instead. He came to the conclusion that "politics always creeps in," that...