Word: miles
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With this couplet, G. K. Chesterton hymned the traditional British inability to get from place to place by a direct route. About the only straight roads on the island are those laid out atop old Roman roads like famed Watling Street, which makes a 160-mile run from London to Wales. In the days of gas rationing, austerity and fewer cars, it was possible for the lucky few to speed across country or through cities with ease. But last week, its inadequate road net jammed with 8,000,000 cars, 1,500,000 motorcycles and uncounted millions of bicycles, Britain...
...dozen main roads converge on a single narrow bridge, lines of cars and trucks stretch as far as the eye can see. The Queensferry bridge over the River Dee-on the main route from the north in Wales-is barely wide enough for two lines of vehicles, and five-mile traffic jams are normal. The last piece of major road construction in London was built 50 years ago. A brand-new cloverleaf at nearby Chiswick, nearing completion after two years' work, is already conceded to be inadequate...
...Pepper Coast of Africa to set up a new nation. Except for Haiti, Liberia was the only Negro republic in the world, but that was about its only distinction. The descendants of the first U.S. settlers formed a haughty aristocracy of "Americo-Liberians" who lived along a 40-mile stretch of the coast and kept the natives of the interior firmly in their place. As recently as 1931, there was a flourishing and brutal slave trade, run partly by the Vice President himself...
...decade later the country still had only one mile of paved highway. The capital of Monrovia was a shanty town with no hotel, no telephone system, no restaurant, and not a single taxi. Electricity burned feebly two hours at night, the city had no running-water system at all, and the whole country was dependent on the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. and its vast (100,000 acres) rubber concession. Elsewhere in Africa, schools, roads and hospitals were being built, but Liberia, as one Liberian diplomat wryly explained, "had not had the benefits of colonialism...
Kirkland House's top-seeded shell won the annual House crew race yesterday, defeating Winthrop by a one-length margin. The Deacons covered the one-mile course in 5:42.2, as a fairly stiff headwind kept all times rather slow...