(2 of 2)
Badge of Honor. The son of a West Roxbury, Mass., fire inspector, Harvard-man ('33) George Frazier has spent most of his life as a freelance writer and a fulltime embellisher of his self-anointed role as an eccentric. When the mood hits him, he drives 464 miles to Buffalo, where the Charter House Motel serves a salad dressing to his taste. He wears $265 suits, brings his own hot dogs to baseball games, and snoots the common man. "Can it seriously be argued," he asked, after observing the deportment of a hockey crowd, "that these ignorant, ill-clad, ill-spoken hooligans—common men all—are the equals of the civilized products of Groton?" All this, Frazier hopes, qualifies him as something of a snob. It is a badge he wears proudly, like the Legion of Honor.
Frazier's hauteur is not confined to Boston Common. During a visit to New York last week, he found the new Americana Hotel "more awful than anyone can imagine," and densely inhabited by ''all the brassy blondes whom you seem to remember from Miami, all the sharp-featured characters in their wrap-around polo coats." Turning away disdainfully, he trained his eye on the city's newspaper strike, found an unexplored facet: the special travail of Manhattan's paper-trained dogs. "It strikes you as so strange." Frazier wrote, "to hear one woman complain, 'I just don't know what I'm going to do about my dog—my poor little Curt. He was so used to the Times that he simply won't have anything to do with any other paper.' It seems so certifiable to hear somebody say something like that, and yet, when you stop to think about it a minute —why, what could make such sense?"
Only George Frazier.