Word: waldo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...groomed with comb, brush, scissors or curlers. The term natural, in its strictest sense, should not be applied to anything contrived or even changed by man. Some philosophers, to be sure, encourage a soupy sort of reductionism. "Nature who made the mason, made the house," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. That notion is nonsense. It is plain as rain that people invented the house to escape the elements of nature...
...would like to reassure Reader James Schaap, who is "hard-pressed to find a public school where Ralph Waldo Emerson hasn't been replaced by tales of streetwise punks" [May 31]. Many of my students are streetwise, but also enjoy Emerson. His philosophy is applicable to the young person today who understands that with our economic turmoil "no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given...
Sometimes, the urge does not vanish. The results are alarming. This month Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. died. That was his final career change. His obituary listed nearly as many metamorphoses as Ovid did. Demara, "the Great Impostor," spent years a his life being successfully and utterly someone else: a Trappist monk, a doctor of psychology, a dean of philosophy at a small Pennsylvania college, a law student, a surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy, a deputy warden at a prison in Texas. Demara took the protean itch and amateur's gusto, old American traits, to new frontiers of pathology...
DIED. Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., 60, audacious faker and inspiration for the 1960 movie The Great Impostor; of a heart attack; in Anaheim, Calif. Although he never finished high school, Demara successfully masqueraded as a Trappist monk, college philosophy teacher, cancer researcher, deputy prison warden and Canadian naval surgeon aboard a destroyer during the Korean War. His surgical feats, learned from textbooks, earned public praise that, in turn, led to his unmasking...
Lance Morrow's timely tribute to Ralph Waldo Emerson [May 10] may have salvaged singlehanded the man's work from burial. Past generations of students were probably bored stiff with Emerson, but today we would be hard-pressed to find a public school where Emerson hasn't long ago been replaced by tales of streetwise punks-all in the name of relevancy...