Word: connector
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...watchword for all ironworkers. Cherry has seen friends fall off beams from dozens of floors up: all through the book there are quick noises and men vanishing instantly into the wind and silence below. They pay the widow and children a full day's pay, and another connector takes the dead man's place. There's another risk: unemployment. Ironworking is dependent upon the amount of building going on, and many ironworkers are lucky to work most of the year. When a job is finished, they look for more work, wait in line. When a building's almost done...
...bottom of a very hierarchical trade, and very afraid that he wouldn't "make it." That he wouldn't learn fast enough, that the other workers, contemptuous of inexperience, wouldn't accept him. This is a continuing apprehension throughout the book. The day that he becomes a connector is practically an epiphany...
...that there is a special feeling about being an ironworker, a special life, special requirements and frustrations. And Cherry gives enough glimpses of them that we feel what's missing. But he can't bear to write it down. The book's tragic figure is Timmy, an alcoholic connector who's on the "drunk gang" (unimportant projects--usually wrecking) and pours out his life story one night in a bar. He is someone who was created by ironworking--it defines him--and when he recurs throughout the book he is powerful. But it leads Cherry nowhere: when Timmy falls...
...Continental Connector Corp., a mini-conglomerate that bought the Dunes, has experienced a stock drop from last year's high of 83⅝ to 27⅜ in mid-December, when the American Stock Exchange halted trading. The ban will be lifted when the company re-certifies its financial statements for the past three years. The SEC accused Continental Connector's management of issuing two proxy statements falsely stating that an audit, which included the Dunes, had been made in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. As one result, the owners of the Golden Nugget casino have called...