Word: dimouts
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Dates: during 1942-1942
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...Jersey, since 1764, Atlantic coastwise mariners have navigated by the gleam of the Sandy Hook lighthouse. Once in 1776 a U.S. Army captain smashed the light to hamper the movements of British ships. Last week, for the second time in 178 years, the dimout regulations doused the light again...
...group in the U.S. this week the wartime dimout on the East Coast is a pleasant necessity. They are the seaboard members of the informal fellowship of amateur astronomers. All over the U.S., through handmade telescopes mounted in attics, haylofts, garages, cornfields, hilltops, these sidereal sightseers lift up their eyes on cloudless nights to peer at the stars. Until the dimout their stargazing was hampered by the electric corona (newspapers now call it "lume") that glares on the sky above brightly lit towns. Now, with lights out or dimmed, amateur astronomers can see new hundreds of feeble stars...
...minors, backbone of U.S. baseball, have been hardest hit. Of their 41 leagues, twelve have folded this year: ten were frightened out of starting the season, two gave up when seacoast dimout regulations prevented night games. Approximately 25% of their players have been lost to the armed forces and higher-paid defense jobs. Another wartime blow to the night-playing, bus-traveling minor league clubs was the recent ODT ban on chartered busses. But as long as they can get around in borrowed station wagons, baseball's bush leaguers have no intention of quitting...
...majors have had fewer problems. The only night games affected by the sea-coast dimout are those held at Brooklyn's Ebbets Field and Manhattan's Polo Grounds, where the Dodgers and Giants now play at twilight instead. Some big-league stars have walked off to war; many more will follow. But up from the minors have come a bumper crop of rookies who have helped fans forget the Greenbergs, Fellers, Padgetts, Travises...
...there in the water on a certain June night cannot be told. But the people of a small New England town (pop. less than 4,000) can guess. About 11 p.m., when the fog cleared and the stars came out, Frank Aresta, a policeman (by day, a grocer) on dimout duty, saw a flash followed by low, rolling thunder, then another and another. Said he to Carpenter James Thomas: "Storm, hell-that's shootin'." He telephoned the Coast Guard station. Soon a plane roared...