Word: battlements
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Helms rode in the car behind Hitler in a motorcade through Nuremberg, where the frenzy spilled down every street. At the Burg, a medieval castle, Hitler came out on the battlement for one of his rare interviews. Helms was seized by conflicting emotions. He looked down on Hitler, who was smaller than Helms had thought. Hitler's handshake was firm. But his personality was not hypnotic. His eyes possessed no power, as the myths had it. Hitler's skin was coarse and his mustache slightly gray. His bottom teeth were goldplated, which made Helms suspect they were false...
...except the company's top executives knew that the bust was coming. Most of the stunned employees at Colony first heard the news on radio or TV. In Battlement Mesa, a half-finished company town built by Exxon, a few furious workers immediately went on a rampage. They overturned garbage cans, tore down company-owned fence and fired shotguns through the windows of their company-owned trailer homes. In the town of Parachute, 15 miles from the Colony site, men piled into O'Leary's Pub and the Old Bank Saloon, where they drank, pounded...
Some were not so free to go. Walter Saunders, 47, had moved his family from Virginia and bought a $91,000 home in Battlement Mesa. The house has lost perhaps a quarter of its value overnight. "I really don't know what's happening," sighed Saunders last week. "I guess we somehow try to fall back and regroup...
Exxon had envisioned Battlement Mesa, which housed 1,800, as a bustling city for 25,000. Some 65 homes and apartments have been completed, and more than 250 are under construction. Two schools, a recreation complex, a golf course, a supermarket and a shopping center are also unfinished. Though Exxon has not yet decided what to do about Battlement Mesa, the townspeople fear that most of the buildings will never be completed. Said Ray Guerrie, president of the town's First National Bank: "I just hope we can weather this crisis." Last week his tiny bank was packed with...
...Gardner, 54, a Parachute native who operates the town's Conoco gas station: "There'll be a boom again. You just wait till gasoline goes up a few more cents a gallon. Oh hell yes, they'll be back." Local people still hope that Parachute and Battlement Mesa will not become ghost towns like Silver City and Russell Gulch, which prospered only briefly during Colorado's gold and silver rushes...