Word: boatmen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...meaning. The Iranians expressed the same thought with different words: "Two midwives will deliver a baby with a crooked head." So do the Italians: "With so many roosters crowing, the sun never comes up." The Russians: "With seven nurses, the child goes blind." And the Japanese: "Too many boatmen run the boat up to the top of the mountain...
Rising in the Rockies and meandering listlessly through four states, the silt-strangled Arkansas River has brought devastating floods and fascinating legends to the hapless people along its banks, but not much else. Boatmen in the 1840s stopped near Conway to soak up liquor and lie in the sun until they swelled like toads, giving Toadsuck Ferry its name. At Dwight Mission, the Cherokee sage, Sequoyah, developed his syllabary in 1828, providing a written Indian language. Now Toadsuck Ferry is gone, replaced by a bridge, and Dwight Mission lies under the waters of a reservoir. Both are victims...
...waterway. Keelboats explored it in the early 1800s. By the 1820s side-wheelers pushed past the Fort Smith sandbars. Before going to Texas, Sam Houston steamed up a tributary in Oklahoma to wed his Cherokee beauty. Henry Shreve, founder of Shreveport, in 1833 eliminated 1,500 navigational snags, but boatmen still grumbled that the river's "bottom is too near its top." By the 1870s, the snags, sandbars and erratic flow were stifling traffic along the Arkansas, and when rails spanned the river at the turn of the century, even the steamboats vanished...
...shimmers enticingly on the horizon, just 24 miles from Los Angeles. "Santa Catalina," says Coast Guard Lieut. Edward McGuire. "You can see it, and the distance seems perfect for a weekend's outing. Everybody makes a try for it, and lots fail: out of gas." In Miami, power-boatmen quickly learned that the local Coast Guard was giving away gas to those whose tanks went dry. "Until some of our skippers got tough and charged a fee," recalls a Coast Guardsman, "we were running a floating gas station...
...Bother. "At least 75% of the accidents could have been easily avoided by minuscule foresight," sighs Captain David Oliver of the Coast Guard in Chicago. "Mostly it's just plain stupidity." Seasoned boatmen still shake their heads over the youthful sport who recently went blasting around Lake of the Ozarks, Mo., with a water-skier in tow. Keeping his eyes on the skier, he slammed at 30 m.p.h. into a cabin cruiser, decapitating himself in the process. Equally foolish were the nine people who piled into a 16-ft. outboard and put to sea from York, Me., last June...