Word: fell
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...when moonshots started boring people and networks no longer felt like covering them in depth, support for space fell faster than Skylab. Nixon, whose obnoxiousness had interrupted the moonwalk, turned around and canned the last three Apollos. The funds for the proposed space station were cut sharply, meaning that Skylab would be built on the cheap, out of a mishmash of spare parts from the Apollo programs. NASA wanted to put the station into a higher orbit than the one ended in Australia last week, but the money wasn't there...
Here too the American capacity for joking about Skylab flourished. Columnist Russell Baker proposed a series of letters for NASA to send, depending on where Skylab fell. Example: "Dear Greece: It's a crying shame about the Parthenon, but as American daddies used to tell their sons back in the days when the Model T finally broke down, nothing man makes will last forever...
This is a tragic decline for a nation that emerged from the gas-rationing days of World War II with excellent mass transit. Ironically, the U.S. fell victim to postwar prosperity. As the economy began to boom, American life-styles changed dramatically. Instead of living in a city apartment and riding a trolley to work, people wanted a home in the suburbs and an auto or preferablly two. As a consequence, mass transit became caught in a vicious downward spiral: the more riders that were lost the worse the service became; in turn, bad service drove away additional riders...
...Incas were so enamored of the beast that only the royal family was permitted to eat it or wear garments made from its wool. Under such protection, an estimated population of 2 million vicunña ran wild. But after the Incas' downfall the fragile creatures fell on hard times 'too Prized for their soft, fleecy wool (now selling for $90 a lb.),* the vicuñas became the buffalo of the Andes: there were fewer than 10,000 in Peru by the late 1960s, and they were practically wiped out elsewhere...
...corner cabinets went for $608,920, and a folio cabinet fetched $655,760. But the most breathtaking buy was a garishly ornate Louis XV corner cabinet. The contenders were two agents working for anonymous buyers and Art Dealer Andrew Ciechanowieski of London's Heim Gallery. As the salon fell silent with tension, the three repeatedly raised the price in jumps of $117,000. Finally, Ciechanowieski, nodding his head, raised the bid to $1.7 million-more than three times the amount ever paid for a single piece of furniture in an auction. All told, the collection fetched $12.8 million, which...