Word: blackout
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Most astonishing of all to cynical New Yorkers was the catalogue of crimes and disasters that never happened. Only two citizens lost their lives as a result of the blackout: one fell down a stairway and struck his head; another died of a heart attack after climbing ten flights of stairs. There were one-fourth as many arrests as on a normal night. Despite darkened department stores, few shoplifters were active. "We can't do much business in the dark, but neither can the shoplifter," said Macy...
Scores concluded that, like latter-day Mrs. O'Learys, they were personally to blame for the blackout. After trimming the ends of some loose wires in readiness for the house painters next day, a Manhattan housewife saw the whole city go black and gasped: "What have I done now?" A small boy in Conway, N.H., whacked a telephone pole with a stick, saw night descend, and raced home weeping to his mother...
Women's Wear Daily, which is more authoritative about see-throughs than breakthroughs, came up with the farthest-out rumor of all. The blackout, it said, was caused by the test of a super-secret Pentagon weapon called "Fireball," whose object was to draw all available power from New York, divide it into two beams and shoot it into space. "The point at which the two incredibly powerful beams crossed," the paper explained, "would become a mammoth burst of artificial lightning and would presumably destroy any enemy missiles within range...
...blackout tried everyone's resources?and few would admit defeat. In stalled elevators and trains, passengers improvised games, including one whose object was to suggest the unlikeliest partners for stalled elevator cars (samples: Jean-Paul Sartre and Norman Vincent Peale; Defense Secretary McNamara and a draft-card burner; any Con Edison executive and any New York housewife). Trapped office workers improvised candles with copies of Book Week and rubber cement...
...Secretaries. Within minutes of the blackout, practically every hotel room in town was taken, and hotel lobbies, office couches and National Guard armories quickly filled with refugees. Some 80,000 stranded commuters slept in cavernous railroad stations. At Grand Central, one man was determined to get something more comfortable than a marble bench. "Kind of jokingly, I suggested he take a sleeper to Detroit on our Wolverine Express," said Ticket Seller Fred Hopkins. "So what does...