Word: hums
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...only industry-closed down. Said a worker: "You don't feel right and you think 'what's wrong?' And then it comes to you: the mill is quiet. We've been listening to that noise all our lives, even in our sleep. Makes a hum, kind of. It makes you feel funny to have it quiet...
...Classics. In the last 100 years, the 15,000 fatherless boys who have gone through the "Hum" (campus corruption for home) have turned out to be everything from mechanics to insurance-company presidents. Girard has a "double curriculum." Every "newbie" (new boy) must try ten different trades, and then pick his favorite. Girard also teaches the standard grammar and high-school subjects, except for Latin and Greek, which Stephen Girard considered a waste of time...
Last week, in the $1.5 million chapel where Hummers meet for prayer and hymns, but where no minister has ever set foot, Harry Truman ended his visit to the Hum. After a happy day "knee-high in boys," he had tried Hum-Muds-the college's special ginger cakes. Then he ad-libbed nostalgically of the days when he was a boy and milked cows, split wood, cleaned oil lamps. Things were different now: "this great country has only started on its career . . . Oh," cried the President, "I wish I were 18 . . . I wish I had the same opportunities...
...dusk. Over at the rival Hearst Call-Bulletin, the column seemed to stir memories. Leafing through files, the Hearstlings found an April 23 piece by A.P. Columnist Hal Boyle-on the moods of Manhattan at dawn and dusk. They reprinted the columns side by side, under the heading HO HUM. Sample quotes...
...place was Valentia, Ireland, European terminus of Cyrus Fields' newly laid transatlantic cable. A young telegrapher named Joseph May heard an unfamiliar hum on his code receiver. He stumbled on the cause: a shaft of sunlight, streaming through the window, fell on an electrical resister and jammed his code receiver. When May passed his hand between the light and the resister, the hum stopped. But why? May decided, rightly and brightly, that the resister (or the selenium that coated it) must have what are now called photoelectric properties; i.e., that it could convert light values into electric values...