Word: comstocking
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Panning out the thin gold in Nevada's Carson Valley in the 1850s, miners cursed a heavy blue sand that clogged their rockers. In 1859, "Old Pancake" Comstock and three others, playing a hunch, staked out a 1,500-ft. claim around the mouth of a small spring where the blue sand was thick. They sent a sample of crumbly stuff across the mountains to an assayer in Grass Valley, Calif. He tested it twice, to be sure. There was no doubt: the stuff that gold miners had cursed and kicked aside was rich in silver...
That was the beginning of the famed Comstock Lode, but it was 15 years before it really paid off-when it became the royal domain of four shrewd Irishmen. In just one year (1874) each became a multimillionaire. Oscar Lewis, annalist of San Francisco and author of a good book (The Big Four) on the builders of the Central Pacific, has written a thoughtful history of the men who exploited Corn-stock's richest ore. He makes it clear that the West as a whole gained nothing from this strike but a prolonged fever and a legend...
...Bonanza. The men who made and kept the great Comstock fortunes were good gamblers with a certain kind of brains. Two of them, John W. Mackay and James G. Fair, had been pick-&-shovel men in their time. The two others, James C. Flood and William S. O'Brien, never -ot closer to mining than the floor of San Francisco's Mining Exchange. Mackay and Fair, who came to the top in the rough & tumble life of Virginia City, get more than two-thirds of Author Lewis' space...
...Connecticut, it is still a misdemeanor for a doctor to advise, or a citizen to practice, birth control.* This 68-year-old blue law, a relic of Anthony Comstock's crusades, is widely disregarded, seldom enforced. But Connecticut's doctors, who object to being lawbreakers, even technically, have tried eleven times in the past 24 years to get the law repealed. Last week, as they tried once again, Connecticut medicine was shaken by one of its biggest rows in years...
Secretary Stettinius last week let newsmen inspect the penthouse where he and his Big Power colleagues called the tune for the San Francisco conference. The apartment, atop the Fairmont Hotel, had been lent to Mr. Stettinius by wealthy Mrs. James Leary Flood, whose fortune originally came from the famous Comstock Lode (Nevada gold, silver). The facilities included a superb view of San Francisco's hills and bay, four bedrooms with bath, a circular library with a blue ceiling, and two love seats, upholstered in green, where Viacheslav Molotov and his consultants sat during the Big Power meetings...