Word: gaff
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...never really been a wholehearted step forward. So it was that on a bright, late-summer day, farmers, fishermen and their families-6,000 of them in all-flocked to the ramshackle Wallace Shipyards in Thomaston (pop. 2,500) to cheer "that Ackerman boy" as his new two-masted, gaff-rigged schooner slid down the ways and eased majestically into the clean waters of the St. George River, exactly as hundreds of schooners used to do before steamboats, trucks and trains put most of them out of business more than half a century...
...most of all we were interested in this Jack Guy guy. Frankly, we didn't believe he existed, except as an advertising model. Imagine them inventing this old guy "Guy." And all the gaff it tossed around about his starting the toy line: "Back in the 1950s, Jack Guy got concerned because the art of making folk toys was disappearing from his native Blue Ridge Mountains..." The publicity went on to talk about how the toys had now spread throughout the country and even into some "furrin'" countries. (A few paragraphs later they say there were some sold in "foreign...
...that in the Olympic year of 1972 some 65 of the world's largest windjammers closed a series of races by parading into the harbor of Kiel, West Germany. The book ends with a catalogue of boats that took part-square-riggers with skyscrapers of sail, brigantines, Dutch gaff cutters, topsail schooners. In between there is nothing but glorious pictures of tall ships, webbed traceries of cordage, acre upon acre of canvas, panoramas showing the vast fleet dotting troubled waters, symmetrical silhouettes of crews aloft on yardarms, looking like Chinese gymnasts, bringing in sail. The same great ships appear...
...colleagues have also studied the relationship between customers and concessionaires, including dishonest ones. With the public's growing sophistication, carnivals have had to cut down on cheating. But Truzzi identifies two shady specialists who still inhabit the carnival world. One is the carnie who "works the gaff," a hidden device to keep customers from winning games touted as tests of skill. The other is the "stick," a carnie who passes himself off as a customer to lure marks into playing gaffed games...
...naval architecture and never went beyond ninth grade. From groves on his own farm he cut white pine for her planking, black spruce for her spars, oak for her ribs. He poured the lead for her keel in two old iron bathtubs. One of his brothers made her trapezoidal, gaff-headed sails (no newfangled spinnakers for Kathi A nne). A brother-in-law made her goosenecks, blocks and deadeyes (no modernistic turnbuckles). Spoon-bowed Kathi Anne plowed a fast furrow in the races at Lunenburg Harbor...