Word: levelling
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week, as the massive Columbia shouldered against its banks, surged muddily over low-lying farmland and gnawed at its retaining dikes, the people of Vanport got a warning: the Columbia was 15 feet above flood level, highest in 54 years. It might overflow. One afternoon it did. The railroad fill protecting Vanport broke suddenly, and Vanport's jerry-built structures crumpled like matchwood under 15 feet of muddy water. In the wild scramble for safety, wives were separated from husbands, mothers from children. Bewildered and shocked, survivors told of seeing "hundreds" trapped by splintering walls or crushed...
...brothers gather their gossip and opinion by a busy round of telephoning, lunching and buttonholing sources. Then they meet to decide who writes the next column, or whether they should do it jointly. Their contacts are largely second-level Government men like Harvardman Charles ("Chip") Bohlen and ECA's Dick Bissell, an old Grottie of Joe's class. The Alsops think press conferences a waste of time, go to Harry Truman's only a couple of times a year, just "to see what the President looks like...
Radio, once it grew up a little, scampered out of the kitchen as fast as it could. Television, being at the beginner's level, still spends a lot of its time in the kitchen. Most TV recipe shows are as flat as stale beer, but one stands out from the rest like a glistening grape in a flavorless aspic...
...Poorhouse. It was not the whole score. Against such successes, other continuing dilemmas stood out. Japanese industry had recovered to 40% of the 19307 34 level. For example, the great Yawata steel plant (a favorite wartime target of U.S. bombers from China) was producing again-62,000 tons of ingots and rolled steel in April; but this was only one-seventh of 1941's peak production rate...
...Forest also knew the Southern admiration for virility: "If you will fight, if you are strong and skillful enough to kill your antagonist, if you can govern or influence the common herd ... if you stand by your opinions unflinchingly, if you do your level best on whiskey, if you are a devil of a fellow with women, if, in short, you show vigorous masculine attributes, he will grant you his respect...