Word: icing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...channel has just opened up!" cried the excited announcer on station KFRV. "There's a four-foot ice jam across the river! My prediction now is it'll go tomorrow. A big chunk just broke loose below the radio shack! That's the way it starts. Stand by-if anything happens, we'll be back...
What the announcer was reporting from his eyewitness perch to intent listeners all over Alaska was not an impending natural disaster, but the Alaskan equivalent of the Irish Sweepstakes: the yearly pool on when the ice would break up in the Tanana River at the little town of Nenana, southwest of Fairbanks. This year hopefuls all over the 49th state and Canada's Yukon Territory (no tickets are sold to "outsiders") bought 170,000 tickets at $1 apiece for a chance to guess the exact day, hour and minute of the breakup. The exact minute is determined...
...Nenana lottery started in 1917, when railway workers got up a $600 pool, won by a man who guessed that the ice would break up at 11:30 a.m. on April 30, still a favorite date among pool guessers. Not since that first year, mourn citizens of Nenana, has anybody from the lottery's home town won a prize. But Nenana (pop. 350) runs the contest as a civic enterprise and rakes in some 40% of the total take every year without any help from luck. In the spring, just about every adult in town works for the lottery...
Last week the ice started grinding downstream, setting off a siren that brought everybody in town to watch the ice batter at the pole. At 11:26 a.m., May 8, the clock stopped. Holders of the eleven winning tickets, worth $8,454.50 apiece, ranged from a Fairbanks truck driver who had been betting on the Nenana lottery for 30 years to an Anchorage oil-company employee who had been in Alaska less than a year...
Unannounced, he showed up a few nights later to catch the American Holiday on Ice show at the Lenin Sports Palace with his son Sergei, as well as First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan and cronies from the Central Committee. Afterward, in a private room at the back of the hall, Khrushchev gave a caviar-and-smoked-salmon party for the cast, scattering bear hugs and backslaps among hearty toasts in brandy. There was no talk of politics...