Word: firemen
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Tolling the Dead. An hour passed before the gasoline finally burned itself out. In the silence which followed, firemen and policemen advanced on the blackened streetcar, hacked its doors open. Then, faces set, they began carrying out blackened bodies which were stacked like cordwood on the rear platform. A crowd of 15,000 which watched from behind fire lines began counting aloud, as each corpse was removed. Thirty-three had died; 40 had been injured. It was the worst city traffic accident in U.S. history...
...Francisco, mortally afraid that it would be credited with fewer than the 827,000 inhabitants who were officially counted during a special census in 1945, was sending cops, firemen, and meter readers out to track down uncounted citizens. Seattle, which has 508,096 names in its city directory, had a fevered hunch that the census count would be less than a half million (1940 pop. 368,000). Its city council appropriated $800 to provide enumerators with free bus fares. Idaho Falls cried that it had been robbed by census-takers of 15% of its population...
...Then the firemen reached out for another concession-a second fireman in every diesel engine crew. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers had been trying to get in on the deal, arguing that there should be a second engineer. The railroads turned both brotherhoods down, on the ground that their demands were out & out featherbedding. Over a period of six years three presidential boards had a careful look at the facts, decided that the brotherhoods were unreasonable. Railroads estimated that adding a third man would cost them at least $40 million a year...
...popular strike; some 200,000 men were unwillingly out of work. By week's end, all four railroads were moving some passengers, some freight behind diesels manned by supervisory personnel, regular engineers and in some instances even by regular firemen. In Chicago, negotiators for the two sides had holed up in separate hotels, arguing with each other through exhausted federal mediators. This week the two sides reached an agreement and the strike ended. The union, said the railroads happily, had given up on the third man, and other issues would be arbitrated later...
...employees; special plans also cover members of Congress,* the foreign service, the armed forces, and a sprinkling of minor bureaus from the Tennessee Valley Authority to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. State and local governments also provide for 2,100,000 of their workers; most policemen, firemen and teachers have retirement and welfare programs of their...