Word: prankster
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Salinger's transition from prankster on the Potomac to savant on the Seine was a while in the making. After Kennedy was assassinated, Salinger lost election to a Senate seat from California; bounced around a few uncongenial executive suites in the U.S., England and France; and helped manage George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign. After that debacle, he fled to France, jobless. Publisher Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber immediately hired him for L'Express in 1973, shortly before the Watergate story broke. Salinger's ability to make that long and intricate crisis comprehensible to a nation...
...First Amendment Blues" [Aug. 15]: Since when have our courts interpreted the First Amendment literally? If a prankster has no constitutional right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, then certainly Nazi goons have no right to march in Skokie, Ill. If freedom of speech and of the press does not apply to Deep Throat or Larry Flynt's Hustler, then it should not apply to the hate-mongering literature and rabble of the Ku Klux Klan or their Nazi comrades...
...rushed through the audience, raised his arm and-splat! Prankster Aaron Kay, the man who once pasted Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the face with a cream pie, had struck again. This time the pie was apple crumb and the victim was New York City Mayor Abe Beame, who was participating in a mayoral forum at Manhattan's Cooper Union. Fortunately for Beame, the pie merely splattered his blue suit. The mayor shrugged off the caper with a quip: "I like the Big Apple, not apple...
McCall probably first earned his national reputation as an environmentalist, not a prankster. During his eight years in office, moderate Oregon banned throwaway bottles and flip-top cans, liberalized its abortion and contraception laws, and began a policy prohibiting development of the state's 300-mile coastline. McCall--and many other Oregonians--wanted to save the state from the anarchistic growth that California and other states had experienced in the preceeding years. The state tightened up environmental regulations--so much that some heavily-polluting factories had to be closed--and discouraged all but clean industries from settling there...
...particularly appealing loser named Mike Katz, sometime pro footballer, currently a phys.-ed teacher and devoted family man. Katz is one of those nice guys who finish fourth in all sorts of competitions. Here he is done in by a psych artist named Ken Waller, a not-too-merry prankster who steals bits of his opponents' costumes in order to upset their concentration before they go on-stage to face the judges. Katz's musculature may, on one level, set him irrevocably apart from the rest of us, but his sweet sporting spirit as he sits trying...