Word: boatman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last fortnight, tourists who went out to Xochimilco found the boats untended, their flowers wilted. An old boatman named Cecilio ("Negro") Pacheco explained why. He leaned over the side of his canoa, plunged a muscular arm into the murky water. "Look," he said. His arm caused a sucking sound as it went up to the elbow in thick mud. "Who wants to ride around Xochimilco...
...what he actually was. He sometimes regarded himself as two persons ... At night, frequently, he imagined there was an intruder creeping about the room ..." Down to his last dollar, he went to the East River to drown himself. A drunken Scotsman danced around him singing. A canal boatman offered him a ride to Tonawanda. He gave up suicide, set out the next day to pawn his watch. On the way he met brother Paul, who tearfully pressed a roll of bills into his hand and sent him to a sanatorium for rest...
They learn about Mike Fink, the great river boatman ("a helliferocious fellow," Davy Crockett called him, "and an almighty fine shot"), and in doing so learn about pioneer life on the Mississippi too. They follow Johnny Appleseed across the land, read about the places he went, and something of the apple industry ("Johnny wasn't very practical," one little girl complained. "He would have gotten apples faster if he'd planted cuttings instead of seeds"). When they come to Joe Magarac, the man of steel (he could squeeze out eight rails of molten steel at once), they study...
...questions came fast. Where was his home town? He did not seem to understand. Where was he born? That was easier: "In Kuibyshev, on the Volga River." "We know all about the Volga," a brassy chap informed him. "We have a song called The Volga Boatman" "Very nice song," observed the ambassador...
...those who wonder what Russians sing besides the Volga Boatman and Ochi Chernyia, Vasili Pavlovich Solovyev-Sedoi, Russia's top Tin Pan Alley man, has the answer. Sedoi's simple, easy-to-hum melodies flow constantly out of Russian radios. In restaurants and cabarets, couples sway nightly to such Sedoi hits as Nightingale, It's Long Since We've Been Home. More important yet, Songwriter Sedoi manages to please Russia's culture cops, who regard dzhaz as "vulgar musical stew." This year, Sedoi won his second Stalin prize...