Tiger Woods

[Harrold Wilson Gray]

On Sep 1, 2005, at 10:55 PM, sagehen wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       sagehen <sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Tiger Woods
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>
> Wilson Gray writes:
>> I've just heard one of our loocal newsreaders describe Tiger Woods as
>> "looking  _tan_." It reminded me of the time that a black student
>> walked barefooted into the student center at Washintoon U. in St,
>> Louis, moving a white student to quote, "Blessings on thee, little
>> man! / Barefoot boy with CHEEK!" stopping himself before finishing the
>> line with "... of tan!"
>
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> Might also have been thinking of /Barefoot Boy with Cheek/, a humorous
> book
> by Max Shulman  that came out in the '40s.  [Was Barefoot Boy  one of
> Jas
> Whitcomb Riley's?  I remember having to memorize it in grade school,
> but
> can't now call up any more lines.]
> A. Murie
>

Yeah, I remember that book. It spawned a television series that, in
turn, spawned Gilligan's Island. Budd Shulman ran the Watts Writers
Workshop. I'm sure that the poem is one of Riley's. Once upon a time,
it was something that everybody knew. Anyhow, i'm pretty sure that it
was what's now known as being "P.C."- this was in the 'Fifties - that
stopped the speaker in his metaphorical tracks. He didn't want to bring
up the question of color to a person of color.

-Wilson Gray