Word: doubloons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Tony's precocious third-grade essay, "Why I Would Hate to Be a Basement," has long been enshrined in local lore, but his early academic promise has led only to idle fancying. Miss Doubloon, the lad's current teacher, explains to his anxious parents: "He would rather read novels in which the characters toy with a little Brie while waiting for their friends to turn up along the boulevard. If we can't get Anthony to concentrate, and hard, on the War of 1812 and obtuse triangles-" The pupil interrupts: "Like the dumb postmaster and his wife...
Desperate measures are clearly required. Tony's minister father offers to pay Miss Doubloon for the young wag's private tutoring. She agrees and sets her room in the local boardinghouse as the appointed place. Her landlady greets Tony's arrival there with dark suspicion. She senses an aura of incipient scandal hovering about Miss Doubloon. The teacher will, in fact, soon ask her class to read The Scarlet Letter, provoking local bluenoses to declare: "We're gonna tighten our Bible Belt!" On this snowy winter evening, the landlady's wicked mind proves prescient. Upstairs...
...Seeley G. Mudd Library. But inflation was exceeding expectations, and Yale needed to find another $1.5 million as the projected construction cost grew to $6.7 million. Meanwhile, resting virtually unseen in a library vault was the Yale coin collection's most famous gold piece, a 26-gram doubloon struck in 1787 by New York Goldsmith Ephraim Brasher...
Last week Yale offered the doubloon for sale, and within four days it was snapped up for $650,000. The name of the buyer was withheld because possessors of such costly coins rarely risk publicity and a possible ripoff...
With reason. The most celebrated theft of a Brasher doubloon occurred as fiction in Raymond Chandler's 1942 mystery The High Window, later made into a movie. But in 1965 real thieves snatched the Yale doubloon from Sterling Memorial Library. The university got it back only because a private detective, tipped off that a Chicago mobster had the coin, was able to apply...