Word: kallio
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Niilo Kalervo Kallio started playing with puukoilla (Finnish for knives) while he was still in short pants. "What old men can whittle I could whittle before I was ten," he says. "I loved my puukko so much that when I went to bed I'd put it under my pillow and pray I would some day have the sharpest knife in the world...
During Finland's gallant, hopeless "winter war" of 1939-40, Kallio traded his knife for a bayonet, went after the Russian invaders as a private. His father, Kyösti Kallio, was President of Finland...
...duty done, Kyösti Kallio walked approvingly into the Presidential Palace to congratulate his successor. Then, while cheering Finns crowded Helsinki's streets, waving torches, singing the Finnish Army march, Porilaisten Marssi, he drove slowly off to the station, heading for retirement on his model farm in the country...
...sorrowing old President Kallio was too tired to climb the mountain-high problems ahead of him last spring. His country's best land had been handed over to the enemy. The best of its male youth was dead or disabled. Shortages of food, medicine and clothing were tying up the task of resettling half a million refugees from the ceded areas. And the rest of the world, which had loudly applauded Finland's gallant fight last winter, turned its sympathies to new underdogs in the fall. Though free and independent, Finland was thoughtlessly classed with the conquered...
...last September President Kallio's health was ebbing fast. The hasty German press already had him dead from a heart attack. The heart attack was real, but hardy Kyösti Kallio did not die. Instead, two months later, unable to work as hard as Finns think a man must, he resigned...