Word: hards
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...which began when Charles Macintosh started making raincoats in 1823. Vulcanization and later the automobile fed the prosperity; output rose to a peak of 42,286 tons in 1912-at prices that hit $3 a lb. In the jungle, the rubber barons enslaved Indians and immigrants, drove them so hard that 300,000 died; a 230-mile railroad, built to carry rubber from Bolivia, cost 70 lives a mile to build. In Manaus, the rubber tycoons built mansions and watched Pavlova dance in a $10 million opera house. Then England's Henry Wickham smuggled rubber tree seeds to London...
...knows them well; jungle vines are spreading over the mill and pigs root through his crumbling office. "It's here," he says. "No doubt about it-all the riches on earth. I don't know how to get it out, but dammit"-he pounded his desk so hard the Scotch bottle jumped-"it's here! We need men, real...
Getting out the riches is notably hindered by disease. Malaria, yellow fever, yaws, trachoma and filariasis (a forerunner of elephantiasis) sap men's will to work and win. But disease is being fought hard and successfully. During World War II, the U.S. launched a Special Public Health Service (SESP) to protect vital rubber workers from the Amazon's scourges. Now only eight of SESP' 3,153-man staff are U.S. citizens, and 97% of its annual $10 million budget comes from Brazil. The outfit runs 249 rural clinics, 22 hospitals, 109 city water systems, 97 sewage-disposal...
...puffery and outright deception is sometimes ill-defined. For a while admen debated on what side of the boundary belonged the blatant ads for a weight remover named Regimen (sample spot: "Lose six pounds in three days-ten pounds in a week-or your money back!"). Regimen's hard-driving maker, Drug Research Corp.. helped them to decide. It anted up more than $1,500,000 for TV ads last year (and also spent $443,028 on newspaper ads, $189,837 on magazine...
Plante had good reason to violate the code of his craft, which allows goalies mattresses of protection around their body and legs, but nothing over their faces to protect them from a hard-rubber puck driven at speeds up to 100 m.p.h. Result: pro goalies regularly contract what the trade calls "rubber shock" (defined by one player as "first cousin to shell shock"), have even skated off the ice bewildered during championship games. Over the years, Plante had faced up to the attack without flinching, and paid the price: broken nose, hairline fracture of the skull, cracks in both cheekbones...