Word: barrelers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Most unlikely case: the convict who concealed, in his colon, "a tool box containing a piece of gun barrel, a screw driver, two hack saws, a boring syringe, a file, several coins, thread and tallow." Instead of hacking or boring his way to freedom, the ingenious convict escaped his cell by dying of bowel obstruction...
Into his memoirs Author Murray has packed practically everything he knows or has ever heard. There are humorous dozens of cracker-barrel stories. There are shrewd estimates of hundreds of obscure people, cowhands, politicians, maiden aunts, Indians, legalites, buffalo hunters, dirt farmers. There is a bloated recapitulation of human knowledge (all set down as revelation), from casual botanical observations ("a three-leaf plant, like the poison Oak, is usually poisonous [but] a five-leaf plant like ... the Virginia Creeper is never poisonous") to startling historical discoveries (Egypt's "pyramids were constructed in order to satisfy groups and blocks...
...Yankees were stepping into good jobs. Highest stepper was dark, barrel-chested, 30-year-old ex-Sergeant Joe McChester Carthy, Yank's managing editor for three years. Before the war he was a $40-a-week Boston sportswriter, later a racetrack pressagent. Recently he was offered and took a $26,000-a-year job as an editor of Hearst's Cosmopolitan...
...shakedown, Captain Joseph F. Bolger* had warned that she might be unable to leave port unless qualified replacements were supplied at once, to take the place of engine-room officers and men going ashore for discharge. Scraping holes in the bottom of its manpower barrel, the Bureau of Naval Personnel had found enough hands to keep the Midway's twelve boilers and four engines running...
...when Harvard makes five fumbles and gets only four out of nine conversion points in the game before the Yale game, it doesn't look too sharp--especially when the opponent could get taken over the barrel by most Great Boston high schools...