Word: dente
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...them had made cuts in their programs. In Shedd's own Philadelphia, budget cuts this spring threatened to eliminate that most sacrosanct of activities, varsity football. The owner of the Philadelphia Eagles obligingly donated $79,000 to save the jocks, but this grandstanding gesture makes only a small dent in the overall deficit, which has forced the elimination of 600 teaching jobs, trimmed remedial reading, and axed all but five of 31 programs for adults...
Cushion of Air. One successful ferry will hardly make a dent in the traffic jams caused by the 100,000 autos that now use the Golden Gate Bridge daily, 31,000 at rush hours alone. By 1980, the rush-hour figure should be 47,000. Thus imaginative district officials are now planning to siphon off more bridge commuters with four ferries that are larger (750 passengers) and more luxurious (two bars). Later this summer they will also begin trial runs with a giant 60-passenger air-cushion vehicle, which will skim across the Bay in just 15 minutes. But District...
...People feel weak and defeated. We need a hero so strong and so intelligent that nothing can stop him." The job of creating this giant was assigned to an unathletic and sketchily educated young writer named Lester Dent. Trained as a telegrapher, Dent was innocent of grammar ("of no value to we") and guilty of heinous cliches ("The warriors were certainly a chagrined lot"), but he could put out the prose at a Remington-wrecking rate. Under the pen name Kenneth Robeson, he knocked off a 60,000-word Doc Savage novel almost every month for nearly 15 years...
...other characters in Dent's stories are understandably something of a letdown. The Fabulous Five, Doc's "companions in adventure and excitement," are said to be "the five greatest brains ever assembled in one group," but they talk ("Holy Cow! That's plumb ding-y!") like the Beaver Patrol on an overnight hike. Dent's villains are far zingier. They have names like Ull, Ark, Var, Zoro, Rama Tura, "The Sinister Count Ramadanoff" and "The Horrible Humpback"-whose hump, by the way, is packed with nefarious electronic gear. One of his nastiest creations is an Eskimo...
...good in his time. He thinned out the werewolves in northern California, established a Brontosaurus preserve at the center of the earth and prevented an evil maharajah from hypnotizing the entire world. Too bad he could not have done more for the man who actually created him. Author Dent, who died in 1959, never got more than $750 for a Doc Savage novel. His widow, who lives in La Plata, Mo., has no contractual rights to the stories. Of the millions made by the Bantam reprints she will not get a penny...