Word: raconteur
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Died. Paul Howard ("Dizzy") Trout, 56, Detroit Tigers pitching ace and scrambled-syntax raconteur; of cancer; in Chicago. A country boy from Sandcut, Ind., a town "what can be in two different places overnight if the wind blows hard enough," Trout became a Detroit hero during World War II. In 1944 he won 27 games and posted the lowest earned run average (2.12) in the major leagues. He pitched for several years more, then adapted his freewheeling delivery to a job as the Tigers' radio announcer...
...crisis of the national psyche. Yet measured against the events, L.B.J.'s memoirs* of those years, published this week, sometimes seem oddly smooth and windowless, like the travertine walls of the L.B.J. Library built to house his papers in Austin, Texas. The man who was surely the best raconteur in the White House since Lincoln has digested all of that drama -an Administration that began with an assassination and ended with something like an abdication-into more than 600 pages of what is too often dignified rationale (see box, next page...
Divorced. Peter Ustinov, 50, author, raconteur and the only Briton ever to win two Academy Awards for acting (for Spartacus in 1960 and Topkapi in 1964); by Suzanne Cloutier, 44, a French Canadian onetime actress; after 17 years of marriage, three children; in Lausanne, Switzerland...
...mission on Manhattan's First Avenue, where guests sometimes must balance plates on their knees. Bush has invited several of his fellow ambassadors to his summer home in Maine for weekends of tennis, boating, barbecues and tall tales (he is, among other things, an earthy, frontier-style raconteur). This week he will press his points over the national pastime: Bush has invited the permanent representatives and their wives to a New York Mets baseball game...
Died. "Prince" Mike Romanoff, eightyish, Hollywood's reigning restaurateur-raconteur for more than two decades; of a heart attack; in Los Angeles. That no one knew Romanoff's precise age is a fitting footnote to the life of a legendary impostor who at various times passed himself off as Rasputin's assassin, the son of Victorian Prime Minister William Gladstone and a cousin of Czar Nicholas II. Actually, there is evidence that he was born Harry F. Gerguson, the son of Russian immigrants. After trying his hand at farming, peddling papers and bumming, the flamboyant phony with...