Word: gophering
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...crisis was well illustrated by what had happened in the tiny town of Rosemont, near Minneapolis. There, in the expanding days of 1942, the 21,000-acre Gopher Ordnance Works-a typical example of the cornfield-to-factory projects which sprang up all over the U.S.-was built to manufacture powder. Then, for almost two years, the plant stood idle; and finally, last February, workmen began to dismantle its machinery...
Relaxin's discoverer is gentle, publicity-shy Professor Frederick Lee Hisaw, 52. He found the hormone during long, painstaking studies of the sex life of the pocket gopher, a small prairie animal that lives in burrows like a mole...
...researcher at Kansas State Agricultural College in the early '20s, Dr. Hisaw noticed a puzzling fact about the pocket gopher: the animal, for turning around in its narrow burrow, has a very narrow pelvis, and its compressed pubic bones come together in a bridge (called the symphysis), which leaves an opening much too small for the female to deliver her young. But when a female becomes pregnant, the symphysis somehow dissolves, the opening widens...
When Dr. Hisaw published these findings under the title, "The Influence of the Ovary on the Resorption of the Pubic Bones of the Pocket Gopher," nobody paid much attention. But endocrinologists began to get interested when Dr. Hisaw and fellow researchers found the relaxing substance in the blood of pregnant guinea pigs, rabbits, sows, dogs, cats, mares, women. In non-burrowing animals, relaxin dissolved no bone (as in the pocket gopher) but relaxed the pelvic ligaments and widened the pelvic canal, thus making birth easier. Hisaw found that even virgin female animals were relaxed by relaxin...
Wrecking crews moved into Gopher, began to crate the well-greased machinery, at a cost of $858,000, for shipment to other plants. Buildings will be left standing for a time. The farmers were moving back to the fertile land. Quipped one, sardonically twisting the boast of plant-sprouting 1942: "You wouldn't believe it, but this cornfield was once a war plant...