Word: melone
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...crew I came to know worked on a melon machine. It looks like a large dinosaur or insect. It has a lower conveyor belt on which the melons are placed. The belt is periodically turned on by the machine operator and brings the melons to one end of the machine where a second conveyor belt with vertical slats brings the melons up and over into a truck parked at one end of the machine. The machine moves sideways through the field and people walk behind it picking up melons and placing them on the belt. I would walk with them...
...farm community northeast of Los Angeles, have a choice of potential disasters. Would they rather risk being drowned, or drying up and blowing away? State officials want to drain the 521 million-gal, reservoir behind the nearby Littlerock Dam, whose water irrigates the peach and pear groves and melon fields that give the town what little prosperity it has. But the 53-year-old dam sits virtually atop the San Andreas Fault. Although the structure has survived severe tremors in the past, seismologists say it is located where the next big quake is most likely to strike-and state engineers...
Stretching some 58 miles along the Rio Grande lies Starr County, Texas, a barren land of sagebrush and mesquite trees. Most of its 20,000 inhabitants are Mexican-Americans who scrape together a living as stoop laborers during the melon-picking season. Yet in the past two or three years, brick houses worth as much as $75,000 have sprung up among the pink and green shanties that line Route 83 between Roma-Los Saenz and Rio Grande City. Outside some of them sit new refrigerators still in their shipping cartons...
...bring the reader close to an understanding of his literary environment. Rejecting the narcotic apathy in the midst of progress that he considers the downfall of "Our defeated generation...," Qabbani appeals to the young to ignore their parents' example "For we have failed/Are worthless and banal as a melon rind...
Ehrlichman, alas, serves up a minibiography as each minor character appears ("His age was hard to peg," etc.). He is afflicted by compulsive total recall of menus (at CIA headquarters dessert is austere "melon and cookies"; the G Street Club offers "a perfect, soft Brie"). But his prose, often better than serviceable, is sometimes very cutting indeed. (The political career of a Democratic Vice President is summed up as "a lackluster, snail creep to seniority.") By the time the reader gets to President No. 3, Richard Monckton, he is meant to accept Ehrlichman's jungle view of life...