Word: 1920s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...always peering over the horizon. In the 1920s he foresaw an energy boom and took the company into pipeline construction. Later he helped pioneer the now common "turnkey" construction contract, under which Bechtel would design a project, build it, and turn it over to the owner by a set date, for a fixed fee. In 1959 he helped produce a study for a tunnel under the English Channel, a project finally realized this decade...
...upwardly mobile member of New York's largest Mafia family, run by Giuseppe ("Joe the Boss") Masseria, Luciano grew impatient at the Castellammarese war in the late 1920s, a long and bloody power struggle between Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. Lucky offered to eliminate his boss and end the violence, which he saw as disruptive to business. At an Italian restaurant, Joe the Boss ate lead. Lucky assumed control of the dead man's lottery business, while Maranzano seized his bootlegging turf...
...1920s brought in a different era: the Big Boom. Economists chattered about a "plateau of permanent prosperity"--sound familiar? The men who wrote about business were either hacks in eyeshades or dandy dilettantes who looked like escapees from The Great Gatsby--or crooks. A couple of Journal columnists planted their bylines above stories prewritten by corporate flacks; crusading Congressman Fiorello La Guardia exposed them by producing the canceled checks that the writers had accepted...
...producer than for having been a saver of urine (his own), a recluse terrified of dust, a man who, with the right audience (Mormon bodyguards), couldn't see Ice Station Zebra often enough. Yet for every celebrity eccentric, a dozen more labored in obscurity. Who remembers Brian Hughes? This 1920s box-manufacturing tycoon liked nothing better than to patrol the sidewalk outside Tiffany in New York City, an envelope tucked beneath his arm. When the moment seemed right, and pedestrian traffic sufficient, Hughes would let loose its contents, sending a spray of jewels (all fake) clattering across the sidewalk...
...1920s Painful depression in 1920 and 1921. The downturn is immediately followed by unprecedented growth. By 1929, nearly every household in America...