Word: roofer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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McLevy (pronounced McLeevy) was a peculiar institution in U.S. politics. A handsome although notably untidy man, he was a Socialist by label, but he had the political instincts of a Democratic ward boss and the economic views of a conservative Republican. The son of a Scottish roofer, he quit school after the eighth grade, followed his father's trade and became a Socialist after reading Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. He ran for mayor nine times before he finally made the grade in 1933. Bridgeport, a drab industrial city on Long Island Sound, was then nearly bankrupt. McLevy...
...chatty ("This may not give you the creeps but it gives me the creeps"), and he suffers from the peculiar delusion that anything written about a cocktail party is bound to be funny. He also lapses frequently into college humor (speaking of nervous ailments: "Have you heard of the roofer who got shingles from Sears, Roebuck?"), and sesquipedalian prose ("Amidst verbal wonders and linguistic portents the stultification of English was caused by the decapitation of words as well as by unwonted lengthening"). But at his best he is a very funny man. Readers will be well advised to hold their...