Word: derring
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...opening beer bottles, a handkerchief and 1,650 Belgian francs. Nothing else." Bravely the bold aeronaut straightened the pink tie that hung across his cream-colored shirt. Belgium and the motorboat were fast disappearing in the gloaming to windward. As Holland's Walcheren Island coasted by, van der Straeten noticed a steamer below. He valved gas out of the bag above his head, came down low and shouted, "Help!" A sailor on the deck of the steamer looked up. "What?" he cried, but the wind had carried Joseph's ghostly globe far off. "The sun was sinking," remembers...
Back in La Paix tavern, happy couples danced away the night to U.S. song hits while Mrs. van der Straeten served cocktails and gazed anxiously northward. Far out over the North Sea her husband sat patiently on the edge of his basket, his feet dangling over the waves that lapped ten yards below, "so that if I should go into the water, I would not be entangled in the gear." The moon was full by then and "traveling swiftly on the very edge of the waves," Joseph recalled. "It was like a fairy tale." As the waves came even closer...
...happy arrangement. The police gave the balloonist a night's lodging. The London paper offered to telephone his wife and pay his way back to Belgium in return for an exclusive story. "I accepted," said van der Straeten, "and suddenly learned just what journalism is-six parts money and four parts acrobatics." The acrobatics began the next day. When the other reporters arrived, the Daily Express men shoved him from one room to another and jammed him into closets to hide him from their rivals. "I need," said proud Joseph van der Straeten, home at last in Knocke...
...been a lifetime of music. His first compositions were written when he was six; he kept working right up to his final illness. But for music lovers, nothing he wrote after 47 came near what he had done before. He never again reached the heights of his great opera, Der Rosenkavalier...
Died. Richard Strauss, 85, famed composer (Der Rosenkavalier, Salome, Till Eulenspiegel); in Garmisch-Partenkirch-en, Germany (see Music...