Word: mastodon
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Seated inside his 11-ft.-tall brainchild, Mechanical Engineer Ralph Mosher moved his legs and arms and sent the 3,000-lb., four-legged mastodon lumbering across the floor at General Electric's Schenectady plant. As Mosher flexed his arms, the monster climbed a stack of heavy timbers to pose like a circus elephant with one foreleg held in the air. A flick of Mosher's wrist swung a 6½-ft. metal leg in an arc and sent the timbers flying. Another flick and the foreleg playfully kicked sand at watching newsmen...
...affable simplicity. Like his lifelong friend Thomas Jefferson, he was an enthusiastic naturalist and inventor, experimented with everything from doorbells to apple-peeling machines. In 1786, he opened the nation's first natural-history museum, run by the Peale family and displaying the reassembled bones of a mastodon they had unearthed near Newburgh, N.Y., together with 100,000 other stuffed animals and objects...
...gentlemen," he announces in a sepulchral tremolo, "it's just a question of money, but to me it's a personal tragedy." Willie plays it dirty. Before the insurance doctors examine his client, he needles his left leg and right arm with enough novocain to numb a mastodon. Willie plays it go, man, go. Borrowing against his hocus hopes, he picks up a fastback Mustang, a sackful of custom-tailored suits, a foxy set of fox furs for his fat-kneed wife. And when the insurance lawyers are ready to bargain, Willie makes them sit on wastebaskets...
...Harvard-trained Richard F. Brown, 49. He leaves for a new post as director of a planned museum in Fort Worth, which will house the multimillion-dollar collection of the late Kay Kimbell. But for Brown, who had been director since 1961, when the old county museum was mostly mastodon tusks and geological specimens, parting was such sour sorrow...
...game, it would seem, is inexhaustible. Why did Julius Caesar love oysters? Who was Teddy Roosevelt really aiming at when he plugged a Tasmanian tiger? But it is a bit like reconstructing a mastodon from a toenail or a sliver of bone...