Word: merchant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Then, in 1930, when his wife Sarah died, he got the answer. After he buried her he called in the local tombstone merchant, and told him to get to work. He wanted a tomb as big as a house, with six polished stone pillars and a shiny granite roof as thick as a bomb shelter. He also wanted two marble statues: Sarah and John M. Davis as young folks, sitting discreetly at opposite ends of a love seat. The statues were made in Italy, modeled after pictures from the Davis photo album and they cost a mint of money...
...languished after the Civil War. Up-&-coming ports like Houston snatched the title of No. i cotton shipper and took the business away. New Orleans shippers talked about snatching it back, but nothing much came of the talk until Governor Sam Jones in 1940 appointed a chunky cotton merchant named Edward Oswald ("Archie") Jewell to boss the Board of Port Commissioners (the "dock board''), which operates the 7½ miles of publicly owned quays and warehouses...
Farther along Nankwan a black-gowned merchant, Fan Kuang-kua, and his apple-cheeked wife have a counter full of cigarets, wooden combs, runty potatoes, homespun towels and dust-cloths. Yes, says Fan, the Communists had posted many signs and slogans along this very street. Yes, they had been anti-American-they had said Chiang Kai-shek was trying to sell China to the U.S. What does Fan believe? "I understand little of this," Fan says. "I am just lao pai hsing...
Next day Chen's gendarmes fired on a crowd of demonstrators carrying placards, killed four, wounded eleven. The rebellion was on. Crowds seized mainlanders, beat some to death with two-by-fours. They set up a People's Purge Committee. Moderates in the Committee-like the tea merchant Wang Tien-teng-broadcast middle-of-the-road demands: election of mayors; public enterprises to be run by Formosans; abolition of monopolies. Said Wang: "We do not request independence. We support the Central Government and we love our motherland...
...Chinese regulars and MPs-had arrived from the mainland. By last week Chen had executed or jailed all the leading rebels he could identify and catch, and his troops had wantonly slaughtered (said a Formosan delegation in Nanking) between 3,000 and 4,000 throughout the island. Moderate tea-merchant Wang, Chen said, was deceased: "When the troops arrested him, he resisted and was shot." Chen closed down Formosa's last newspaper because it printed a Nanking report that he would be fired...