Word: land
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Milfred Yant is a man with a remarkable air of respectability; it is accentuated by his pudgy figure, his middle-aged stoop, his brownish hair and open countenance. Back in 1935, as a result, he had little difficulty in selling acres & acres of steep, arid, brush-covered land in the barren hills above Los Angeles County's Placerita Canyon. The tract looked like a rest home for Gila monsters, but he got $1,950 an acre for it-just $1,900 more than he had paid...
...system was simple. He erected a corrugated-tin "clubhouse" on land (which he leased but did not own) in the oak-shaded canyon bottom. Then he lured aging citizens 34 miles from Los Angeles by offering free bus rides and free lunches. From the clubhouse he allowed them to catch sight of four broken-down old oil derricks which stood near by. Before they left, most of his prospects were convinced that 1) Yant's land was in the grassy canyon bottom and 2) an ocean of oil gurgled just below the surface...
Promoter Yant sold parcels of land as small as a hundredth of an acre. An agent (employed by Yant) sought out the small buyers, confided that he represented a major oil company, and offered $5,000 for a full acre; many hurried back and bought more land. They never saw the mysterious oil agent again...
Jobs currently open at the Employment Office include sawing wood, running errands, clearing land, chauffering, translating, and tutoring (of non-Harvard students...
...cause of poetry is somewhat redeemed by English Poet Dylan Thomas and by T. S. Eliot. Thomas reads with a rich, controlled romantic lilt, and Eliot's dramatic rendering of a passage from The Waste Land makes it suddenly spring to excited life. The reader begins to discover the pleasures poetry can sometimes yield without guides, crutches or bridges...