Word: mcwhirter
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Dates: during 2004-2004
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...mother? No standard reference book troubles with such trivia, but an offbeat guide called the Guinness Book of Records answers such questions with gusto ... [It is] the world's greatest grab bag of mosts, leasts, longests, shortests, fastests and slowests ... Chosen to compile the book were Norris and Ross McWhirter ... [They] comb thousands of journals to keep their superlatives up to date, correspond with authorities in 110 countries, scan heaps of musty books to track down obscure points ... And when all else fails, they turn to an army of volunteer assistants, including a mathematics expert lodged in Broadmoor criminal lunatic...
...records can be dangerous"? You don't have to look that one up. Of course, it's the Guinness compilation of world records, which has inspired innumerable competitors to win a place in its pages. As we noted when the book's co-founding editor Norris McWhirter died in April [MILESTONES, May 3], the brewers of Guinness stout launched the book in 1955 to settle bar bets. A few years after it began publication, we reported on its quirky appeal...
DIED. NORRIS MCWHIRTER, 78, who with his identical twin brother Ross co-founded the best-selling Guinness Book of Records in 1955 after being commissioned by the head of the Guinness brewery to create a reference for settling arguments between drinking buddies; in Wiltshire, England. The brothers--Oxford graduates, track stars and sports journalists--were also right-wing political activists, and Ross was murdered by the I.R.A. in 1975. Norris played his own role in one record performance in 1954: he was the announcer who described Roger Bannister's breaking of the 4-min.-mile barrier...
...Guinness Book of Records was started in 1955 by a beer company hoping to settle pub arguments. But the true genius behind the book was NORRIS MCWHIRTER, a former athlete and sports reporter who possessed one of the world's most prodigious memories for trivia. McWhirter, who died playing tennis in Wiltshire, England, last week at the age of 78, edited the book through 1986 and established the rigorous record-screening procedures that made it an authoritative guide to natural phenomena, sports records and dubious human endeavors, such as holding 109 live bees in your mouth...
...When asked why they went to such extremes, their explanations were overpracticed, self-mythologizing, implausible. But the truth wasn't hard to discern. Inclusion in the Guinness book gave them prestige, hard to find in impoverished Indian towns. The book reflected a quirk in the mind of Norris McWhirter, and it created its own quirky world. ?By Anthony Spaeth...