Word: got
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Minus Mathematics. William Stuart Symington III (he trimmed the name to W. Stuart Symington as a businessman, dropped the W. when he got into politics) was an "extravagantly beautiful" child, recalls his doting sister Louise. Absorbing the household's bookish atmosphere-adorning the mantle was a Latin motto that translates as "Life without literature is death"-little Stu read so avidly that the family called him "the professor." As his Christmas present when he was ten, he asked for and got a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...
...played left-handed tennis well enough to star on his high school team and make the varsity at Yale. Despite his damaged arm, he enlisted in the Army in 1918, lying about his age to get in, won a field-artillery commission at 17 (the war ended before he got overseas...
...iron foundry owned by his father's brothers. Starting near the bottom, as a chipper and then a moulder, he used to come home black with grime. At night he studied mechanical engineering at the Mechanics Institute, electrical engineering through the International Correspondence School. The year after he got married, Symington borrowed $250,000 from his uncles and started a business of his own, Eastern Clay Products Co., specializing in bonding clay for foundry molds. By its second year, it rolled up a profit...
...barely managed to survive a bitter, 53-day sitdown strike in 1937. Taking over as president in unpromising 1938, Symington new-broomed away most of the old management, set about winning over his workers. William Sentner, Midwest boss of the United Electrical Workers, was an avowed Communist, but Symington got along fine with him. Symington wooed and won the workers with a union shop, dues checkoff, union-management committees and a hefty profit-sharing plan...
...Load of Coal. After the U.S. got into World War II, Symington set out to make gun turrets for U.S. bombers. During the harried months of the switchover at Emerson, with the Air Corps' General "Hap" Arnold calling him up to plead for "just one turret, just one," Symington worked around the clock. When exhaustion dragged at him, he flopped on a cot in his office. When he woke up, often in the middle of the night, he went back to work. General Arnold got turrets aplenty...