Word: boom
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...after 80 years of U.S. ownership. A frontier society-easygoing, vigorous, elementally democratic-at its worst unabashedly bad, at its best unaffectedly generous. Opportunity-but at the price of a stiff endurance test. And to beckon the pioneers on, for good or ill, the deceptive promise of an economic boom (begun by the war, protracted by the proximity of Asiatic Russia), and the deceptive intensity of the brief Alaskan summer...
From Point Barrow to Ketchikan-in mining camps, beauty parlors, banks, offices, hangars, in remote villages with names like Tolstoi, Meehan, Kanatak and Nugget-visitors and Alaskans felt a mounting fever. For, after a short winter letdown, the boom was back with the summer...
...biggest boom is in military construction. Across Bering Strait, Russia, from which the U.S. bought Alaska for $7,200,000 in 1867, is only 52 miles away. Arctic and Pacific defense looms large in U.S. military thinking, and Alaska looms large in both. As Alaska-based B-29s, with lipstick-red wings and tails (easily seen in case of forced landings on the polar icecap), fly routine missions over the North Pole, the Army & Navy are pumping men and millions of dollars into the Territory. At Mile 26 on the Richardson Highway near Fairbanks, the Army is rushing construction...
...Territory's towns are crowded, but areas of military construction blend the fever of the '98 gold rush with the Los Angeles boom of the 1920s. Since 1940, the population of dusty, mountain-rimmed Anchorage has swollen from 3,500 to 14,000. Indians, construction workers, farmers, soldiers, flyers, women in dungarees and muddy boots, women in mink coats and platform shoes, jostle on its mile-long main street, crowd its 66 saloons and liquor stores...
Business at cinemansion box offices was still far below the wartime boom. Variety blamed it on rain, premature summer and lightweight products...