Word: back
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Listen!" Edward Nicholas Cole displayed his consuming love for cars-in a curious way-even as a farm boy back in compact Marne, Mich. (1959 pop. 300). At five, he hopped into the family's 1908 Buick, began toying with levers-and smashed it into a tree. He also showed a tremendous capacity for work. Rising by the dawn's early light, he milked 20 cows, bottled the milk and delivered it before school. The milk route taught him to hustle ("Because the load becomes lighter"), and it also taught him that a touch of extra service...
...often had to take a back seat to Cole's first love: the Cadillac engine. Even at parties Cole slipped out to his car to tinker with it. Once, working to tone down engine noise, Cole tiptoed into a party while everyone was standing around a piano and singing. He hauled out his longtime crony, Harry Barr, now Chevy's chief engineer. Said Cole, starting the car, "Listen!" Barr listened, said it sounded fine, and went back in to sing. But Cole stayed outside, listening to his engine music all night. "That," says Barr...
...light tank in 90 days. Cole beat the deadline, and during the war Cadillac built 12,500 M-55. After the war, Cadillac assigned Cole to apply his tank know-how to building an experimental rear-engine Cadillac. It was a weird monster, with the engine in the back seat and dual rear tires. But during the icy winter of 1945-46 while his neighbors' cars skidded around the driveways, Cole's sped off with sure-handed ease. That car proved to Cole "that the rear engine provides better steering and handling on slippery roads...
Wingate's influential friends helped him fight back with an Appeal to King George VI, but the issue vanished with the outbreak of World War II. Wingate, as a guerrilla specialist, was ordered to Ethiopia, and he embraced that nation and its exiled Emperor Haile Selassie as fiercely as he had Zionism. He led his small Gideon force of British troops and Ethiopian irregulars in a brilliant campaign against a large but dispirited Italian army. Wearing shorts, and mounted on a white horse, Wingate proudly escorted Haile...
Again in disgrace, he was sent back to Cairo and moped around headquarters. His depression was deepened by Atabrine taken to combat malaria. One gloomy afternoon in his hotel room he stabbed himself twice in the throat with a hunting knife. His life was saved by a British colonel next door, who said afterward: "When I hear a feller lock a door, I don't think anything about it, and if I hear a feller fall down, that's his affair, but when I hear a feller lock his door and then fall down-it's time...