Word: drabs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Long before President Carter was asking Americans to set the thermostat at 65°, the temperature at 1908 East 14th Avenue in Spokane, Wash., had been held near 40°-not to save energy but to save money. 1908 East 14th is a drab four-room frame house in a blue-collar neighborhood. It cost $4,000 eight years ago, but at the time, as the present tenant explains, "they were having some trouble keeping the paint on it. Great strips would peel off. They were flopping all over the place...
...name of the factory suburb on the outskirts of Cracow is as drab and anonymous as the upright slabs of apartments that crowd its barren hills: Nowa Huta-New Foundry. Conceived by the Polish Communist state as a counterweight to "reactionary" central Cracow, Nowa Huta is home to the giant, 35,000-employee Lenin Steelworks, one of the largest in Europe. As originally planned, the town was to have schools, shops, theaters, recreation halls and a hospital-but no church. The workers wanted one. After the anti-regime riots of 1956, they won grudging permission from the state to build...
...accompanied the Congressmen on their tour. "The old elegance and grace are still there in the wide, tree-lined boulevards and the colonial-era buildings, but the place is badly in need of some paint, some renewal, some energy. The city is calm, quiet and green, but also poor, drab and dull. Whatever improvement in living standard there has been, if any, has not been dramatic. At night, Hanoi reverts to a kind of overgrown country village. Except for an occasional bicycle or a strolling policeman or two, there is virtually nobody on the silent, dark and lifeless streets...
Needless to say, we were all terribly shocked. With all the right sort of people to marry, Christina picked out this person with brown shoes! Nothing we could say would change her mind, so she went up to Moscow and married him in this drab, crummy ceremony. But just before she was due to go off to the Siberia Hilton or some place for a candlestein honeymoon, something happened, and Christina suddenly left Moscow and showed up at her villa in Athens. Well, I haven't had a chance to get through to her on the phone from here...
Most of the dead workers had come from nearby West Virginia farms, and their families gathered that afternoon at a local firehouse, a drab concrete building that was serving as a makeshift morgue. One worker at the tower, Robert Steele, 35, lost ten members of his family−four brothers, three uncles and three cousins. Friends and relatives consoled each other as Red Cross workers called out the victims' names. A young pregnant woman, waiting to identify her husband's body, sobbed on her mother's shoulder. At dusk, small groups of workers and relatives gathered solemnly...