Word: firsthand
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When Texas City, Texas, caught fire in 1947, Romanoff got on the phone. "Should the area be declared a disaster area?" he asked. "What's needed down there?" The mayor, the Red Cross and top police officials, thinking that they were giving the White House a firsthand report of the damage and injuries, wound up giving Romanoff more information than any other reporter came close to collecting...
When I graduated in '62 I doubted that the Air Force had much use for a future professor of English literature, but I decided to find out. Besides, I wanted something from the Air Force: firsthand information. I figured I had no business trying to teach anybody anything until I knew what was going on beyond the well-tilled fields of Wordsworth. The experience was something like selling one's soul. But it has not been wasted time...
...myths and fables, the romantic dreams as well as the shrewd half truths of colonial times, firmly established a belief in the impenetrable differentness of Asia. The situation was not helped by the fact that Asia itself had produced strikingly little written history. Today growing numbers of Americans have firsthand knowledge of how Asians think and feel, act and react -even though such knowledge is always beset by the danger of oversimplification. Diplomats, soldiers, businessmen, journalists, teachers and technicians constantly contribute to the growing body of "typical" Asian experiences...
...asked our correspondents around the world to tap every source -from the not-for-attribution background of intelligence officers to the firsthand reports of returning travelers, including journalists. Scores of such sources were interviewed: our correspondent in Eastern Europe found a Polish girl recently returned from Hanoi; the Washington bureau talked with a schoolmate of Giap's now living in the nation's capital; the Boston bureau interviewed a French journalist-scholar now at Harvard who has been close to the problems of the Viet Nam area for more than 20 years. More general sources were readily available...
...mayor of Omaha donned hip boots and waded manfully out into the icy currents of the Missouri River. His purpose: to get a firsthand look at the hundreds of tons of offal that Omaha's $700 million-a-year packinghouse industry dumps into the river each day. Besides making his stomach-turning inspection tour, the mayor recently called a special $6.2 million bond election for May 10 to finance, among other projects, a sorely needed sewage-treatment system to help clean up the polluted river...