Word: firemen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Although it is surrounded by water, Manhattan Island has always had water problems. In 1664 Peter Stuyvesant surrendered New York (then called Nieuw Amsterdam) to the British partly because of a shortage of potable water. In 1881 a drought forced New York firemen to learn how to extinguish blazes with dynamite instead of water. In 1949 the city declared a Dry Friday, when residents were asked to stay out of their bathtubs and showers and go unshaven to ease a water shortage. Last week, in the midst of the worst drought they have faced in this century, New Yorkers could...
Strict Sabbaths kept by the Pennsylvania Dutch led to "Sabbath toys" or whirligigs. To entertain the children when boisterous play was banned, soldiers, firemen, Indians and, one suspects, parodies of the neighbors, were carved in wood with paddles for arms, painted and propped on the front porch or fence posts to whirl and jiggle at the slightest whiff of a breeze. They were often intricately animated. One, called Farm Industry, made about 1880, shows a long-skirted woman churning butter while her farmer husband, in the doorway of a barn, sharpens his tools on a grindstone. It doubled...
...huge klieg lights that sent the temperature at ringside to 100°. Then there was the supporting cast. Spooked by reports that followers of the late Malcolm X planned to avenge their leader's death by assassinating Black Muslim Clay, some 300 Lewiston police, county sheriffs, state troopers, firemen and civil defense workers milled around the arena in a ratio of roughly one lawman for every 14 fans...
Graceful Gestures. "Oh, please treat it as a loan!" cried the young Max, in an agony of embarrassment when the firemen who had quenched a chimney fire in the Beerbohm parlor coldly declined a tip. An admirer of Oscar Wilde, Max unhesitatingly and uncritically stood by him in his time of disgrace. A kindred tolerance let him forgive Constance Collier, the actress who jilted him almost as soon as they became engaged. "Of course I don't blame her the very least," he wrote to a friend...
...followers were as good as their word. In Harlem, less than 36 hours after the murder, a fire bomb tossed from an adjacent rooftop through an upper window of the Black Muslims' Mosque No. 7 sent flames shooting 30 feet into the night sky, gutted the building. Six firemen were hurt when a wall caved in, and 320 cops rushed to Harlem from three boroughs under a "rapid mobilization" order after the alarm was sounded. In San Francisco, another mosque was set ablaze, but firemen quickly doused...