Word: melon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Desks & Melon Balls. Groggle spouts 20th Century attitudes, but seethes with Neanderthal prejudices. In the business world, he can stand dilettante competition from women who are "on the marriage-market." "But let a poor benighted female . . . get serious about working, and she is relegated to a class with Catherine de Medici, Lady Macbeth, Use Koch, and . . . accused of Lesbianism, a shortage of the female sex hormone, an arrested Oedipus complex, and of not being a natural mother...
Virginia is a lonely widow with a melony figure and a melon for a head. She is old enough to be Sandrino's mother, and for a while she acts the part. Mornings, she shoos him off to his haberdasher job. Noons, she carts him his lunch topped with his favorite dessert, persimmons. When the weather turns nippy, she digs into her skimpy bank balance and buys him a coat. Then one day her jealous joshing about some unknown girl across the street gives Sandrino his cue-the poor woman is hopelessly in love with...
...watermelon is white until air reaches it and oxidizes it to red, Mewhinney gravely answered: "On July 10, 1893, Dr. Ebenezer P. Humford, F.R.S., LL.D., F.L.S., Ph.D., succeeded in slicing a watermelon inside a glass-encased vacuum at Wallace-Huxley Technological Institute, Hyannis, Neb. Wholly untouched by oxygen, the melon was red." An impressed reporter asked how he could remember so many facts. Soberly, Mewhinney said: "I am blessed with total recall...
...shovelful of New Jersey dirt (TIME, Jan. 29, 1945), Pfizer added it to its line, while continuing a search for an antibiotic of its own. Since no one ever knows where a new antibiotic will be turned up (the purest penicillin strain was discovered growing on a melon in Peoria), Pfizer began to check the molds in 100,000 different samples of soil, gathered from all over the world. The job, says McKeen, was to find "the compounds that God has put in the earth for centuries." After uncovering 75 possible antibiotics, none of which did the trick, Pfizer chemists...
Half an hour later, the first rescuers and firemen toiled up the rutted road to the mesa's top. A Coast Guard plane had flown over and told them what to expect. It looked, said one of them, "as if you had thrown a ripe melon against a wall." The plane had splattered its smoking pieces over five acres. All 44 passengers and six crewmen were dead...