Word: firstborn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ideologically correct couples have ways of working things out. When Skye Kerr married Deane Rynerson, they manufactured a new name: Rykerson. Some couples give the father's surname to daughters and the mother's surname to sons. For their firstborn, Pierce Barker and Carol Frost of Friendship, Md., did not bother with family at all, nor were they intimidated by the perils of hyphenating. They gave the child the surname Roth-Tubman, after the author Philip Roth and the 19th century abolitionist Harriet Tubman. Similarly, in Newton, Mass., Harry Finkelstein and Jamie Kelem junked their surnames and became the Keshets...
...French parents were distraught and desperate. Soon after their firstborn child died at seven months of a rare form of immune deficiency, they received more heartbreaking news. Their second baby, due in August of last year, was suffering from the same, nearly always fatal hereditary disorder, called bare lymphocyte syndrome. They could have aborted the child or allowed doctors to try the same kind of white-blood-cell transplant after birth that had failed with their firstborn. But the couple, who prefer to remain anonymous, chose a historic third option: to let their child receive the first ever transplant...
...connoisseurs of roughhouse local politics, there is no place like Chicago and no name like that of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley. Last week it appeared that the fabled boss's firstborn son might be the next occupant of the office in city hall from which hizzoner presided for 21 years. In a Democratic primary notable for its racially polarized voting, Cook County State's Attorney Richard M. Daley defeated Eugene Sawyer, a black who took over as mayor 16 months ago, after the death of Harold Washington, Chicago's first black chief executive. Daley...
Robertson rapidly moved toward the mystical, perceiving frequent and direct instructions from heaven. Dede, a Roman Catholic, was concerned that her husband was displaying "schizoid tendencies." Their firstborn Timothy was a toddler, and she was pregnant with the second of their four children, when Robertson felt called to a religious retreat in Canada. She begged him by letter to return: "I need you desperately." Robertson was troubled. "Was this God telling me to go home," he recalls wondering, "or was it Satan?" After prayer, he wrote to his wife, "I can't leave. God will take care of you." Tension...
Friends who knew Biden decades ago in Delaware recall all three attributes in the brash Irish boy whose charm could command a crowd even then. The Biden family had moved from Scranton when their firstborn, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., was ten. They settled in a neat, three-bedroom house in a middle-class suburban development called Mayfield. Joe Sr., who never attended college, sold Chevrolets. Joe Jr. shared a room with his two brothers. Valerie, who would grow up to manage her brother's campaigns, was the lucky occupant of the third bedroom...