Word: dam
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...roustabouts, cat jockeys, bulldozers, greasers, welders, dynamiters, mixers, drillers, riggers, still pressed for time, worked on, unmindful of little ceremonies and speeches before movie cameras. With the precise delicacy of spider legs, the slender, giant cranes moved steadily on, lifting twelve-ton buckets of concrete to pour on the dam's western heights. "Dinky" skinners drove trains of concrete buckets over the sky-high trestle; tin-helmeted shove runners and gear-jammers, tools in their belts, plowed on with their job: to move 1,000,000 feet of dirt out of a slide area...
...endured for seven years and seven months. The work had not stopped night or day except on Christmas, Labor Day, the Fourth of July. Seventy-two of them had been killed. Their monument was in concrete, in the biggest thing men had ever made on earth. Grand Coulee Dam towered 550 feet from the ancient bed of the Columbia River, spanned three-quarters of a mile from bank to bank; behind it the waters had piled up in the beginnings of a lake that one day will stretch 151 miles to the Canadian border...
...west vista, overlooking the giant dam, a little clump of 10,000 people stood to hear Washington's balding young Governor Arthur Langlie declare that the Grand Coulee was now in service. Down in the concrete labyrinths of the powerhouse, below the main generator pits, bigwigs gathered on Level 991† around microphones; there stolid Indian bucks and squaws from Colville Reservation watched Chief Jim James pay tribute to the men who had drowned the hunting ground of his ancestors in a new American dream...
...have no intention of detracting in any manner from the fine accomplishments of Mr. Henry Kaiser, as listed in your March 3 issue under Business & Finance, but, as a matter of fact, Shasta Dam in northern California is not being constructed by Mr. Kaiser, or by any of his companies. The general contract for the construction of that dam is held by Pacific Constructors, Inc., president of which is Wm. A. Johnson; secretary, J. C. Maguire; and general superintendent, F. T. Crowe. Mr. Kaiser has no connection with this company...
However, no particular honor is lost by Mr. Kaiser in this regard, inasmuch as he was a principal in the construction of the Boulder Dam (the world's highest) and Grand Coulee Dam (the world's largest in point of volume of concrete). Shasta, when finished, will be second-highest and secondlargest...