Word: snowstorms
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This is a very American novel written by a Frenchman about Belgium. The U.S. note is insistently struck when Robert Drouin, a Paris TV producer, drives through an all-night snowstorm across a wide Flanders plain as featureless and flat as any Midwestern prairie. He asks directions at a roadside inn where huge transcontinental trucks cluster and the room rocks with the blare of a jukebox and the colored lights and clatter of pinball machines. Even the ancient, canal-veined city of Bruges, whose chimes and carillons sound like "pianos in the sky," has a night face of glaring neon...
...above the snow and headed off for the festivities of inauguration eve. The first big event was the inaugural concert, held in Constitution Hall, unmarred for the Kennedys even by the fact that 60 out of 100 musicians, including Soloist Mischa Elman, had failed to make it through the snowstorm for the occasion...
Next on the list was Frankie Sinatra's Hollywood-style Gala at the cavernous National Armory. Happily for the Democratic Party coffers, the tickets had been sold long before the snowstorm-and just as Sinatra had predicted, the show made a mint: nearly $1,400,000 (single seats, $100; boxes, $10,000). Unhappily for the showfolk, however, only two-thirds of the ticket-holders (some 6,000 people) turned up, and what with the traffic delays, the extravaganza got under way nearly two hours late. The biggest stars, of course, were the Kennedys themselves, and they had a fine...
...Manhattan's Grand Central Station, managed to close the New York Central Railroad. A couple of days later, the New Haven Railroad was forced to shut down. At that point, more than 100,000 commuters had been forced to find new ways of getting to work-and the snowstorm made things tougher to the point of impossibility...
...California, the Midwest and Alaska-not with too much hope of winning Alaska's three electoral votes, but to keep his acceptance-speech promise to campaign in all 50 states. In Wyoming, to keep this promise, the pilot of his chartered Boeing 707 had to land in a snowstorm. Nixon, buoyed by Ike's support, told-his audiences that he felt a "tide"' running in his direction, promised "one of the greatest victories in terms of electoral votes in the history of America.'' Increasing the cutting edge of his adjectives, he punched hard at Kennedy...