Word: walnut
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Robert Lewis, 36, a sometime Western Union messenger, liked to hang around the only grocery store in Walnut, Calif, (pop. 929) and bend Co-Owner Leonard Harvey's ear. "I'm proud to say I got nothing against the Negro," Lewis would boast. "Why, I served with them in the Army for eight years, eleven months and 23 days." Grocer Harvey listened sympathetically; after all, he and the rest of Walnut knew that Lewis was the Negro's champion, and had thereby got himself on somebody's hate list...
Lewis' troubles began last December, after the Walnut town fathers refused his demand that they build a road to his one-acre lot on a bungalow-filled slope grandly misnamed Castle Hill. His wife Eva threatened to retaliate by selling the property to Negroes...
...this, the Lewises claimed, was be cause they had offered their property for sale to Negroes. But local cops had their doubts. For one thing, Walnut had no history whatever of racial discord. For another, evidence indicated that the fire in the Lewis home had not been caused by outsiders. For still another thing, the police had only the Lewises' say-so that all those other incidents had ever really happened...
...turned out last week, Robert Lewis was the worst, or maybe merely the zaniest, rogue who had yet tried to turn the surging U.S. civil rights movement to his own purposes. He had somehow figured that by complaining of persecution for his championship of Negroes, he might yet coerce Walnut into building that road to his property on Castle Hill. When the cops began throwing his complaints into their "crank" file, he came up with a real nifty...
...House and Nashville, Tenn.; Christopher Goetze '61, of Randolph, N.H.; John A. Graham '64, of Lowell House and Tacoma, Wash.; Richard G.C. Millikan '63, of Leverett House and Berkeley, Cal.; David S. Roberts '65, of Dunster House and Boulder, Colo.; and Donald C. Jensen '65, of Dunster House and Walnut Creek...