By 1960, Jet magazine was describing Parks as a: " tattered rag of her former self — penniless, debt-ridden, ailing with stomach ulcers, and a throat tumor, compressed into two rooms with her husband and mother."
There was a loud crack and a strong smell of mingled drink with stale tobacco filled the air as a squat, unshaven man in a tattered overcoat materialised right in front of them.
The shelves running around the circular walls were crammed with dusty-looking feathers, stubs of candles, many packs of tattered playing cards, countless silvery crystal balls, and a huge array of teacups.
Indeed, it was difficult to recognize in this tattered, unkempt wanderer, with ghastly white face and fierce, wild eyes, the spruce young hunter of former days.
At the wooden counters up front, laden with thick catalogues in tattered binders, people would haggle for switches, resistors, capacitors, and sometimes the latest memory chips.
Black, stringy biofilms -- cooperative communities of microbes -- hung from the underwater rocky ceiling like tattered Gothic curtains, some of them three feet long.