Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...destination of the guarded man was a bleak chain of coral reefs and windblown wastes inhabited by lizards and black rats-the Monte Bello Islands, off the northwest coast of Australia. There, while planes crisscrossed overhead and a flotilla of eleven Australian warships plied the nearby sea to keep the curious away, Britain last week made its great gamble...
...hardy people. Newfies (a term they use but do not much like) are nearly all natives; 98% were born on the island, mostly of English and Channel Island stock, with generous traces of Irish, Scotch and French. Isolated for centuries, their character tempered by wresting a living from their bleak island and the sea around it, the Newfies have developed into an independent, hardworking, happy breed. Their wit and individuality show strongly in their geographic names. Newfoundland places are called Happy Adventure, Come By Chance, Heart's Delight, Witless Bay, Cuckold's Cove, Naked Woman Point and Horse...
Smallwood's assignment would stagger any ordinary salesman. The bleak island of Newfoundland and the mainland territory of Labrador, which has been part of Newfoundland for nearly 200 years, are among Canada's most forbidding wildernesses. Much of the land is barren and rocky, dotted with lakes and great bogs. In its 154,734 sq. mi., an area almost as big as California, only three towns have more than 5,000 people. There is still no cross-island highway, only a narrow-gauge railroad that arcs across the island but does not touch one hamlet in ten. Newfoundlanders...
...ground floor was the recreation room, a large, round, bleak affair, as dreary as a nightclub in daylight. Beside the gambling table was a huge steel cabinet bulging with roulette wheels, dice, hundreds of decks of playing cards with Esquire-style pin-up girls on the back. On a key board hung keys to every room in the palace, and to dozens of apartments in Cairo, with the names of the occupants attached on neat labels...
...free Finland, editorial writers may say what they like about Russia, but they carefully think before saying it. The cafe arguer may damn Stalin to his heart's content, but he makes a joke instead. Finland's President proclaims publicly in the bleak tones of a bank examiner: "Our relations with Russia are friendly." In private he says wistfully, "Finland is a Western nation." Finland refused Marshall Plan aid on the ground that that would be entering an alliance against Russia, but it accepted a U.S. loan. When a newsman remarked that this was a pretty fine distinction...