Word: minting
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Once inside the $560,000 building, each $14,000 brick became the direct responsibility of amiable Russell John Van Home, 45-year-old Mint employe who had spent 21 years in the San Francisco Assay Office when he was sent to the Fort Knox depository last July and given the title of Chief Clerk in Charge. Chief Clerk Van Home's gold is about as safe as human ingenuity can make it. The gold storage vault is a massive box 40 ft. by 60 ft., with top and sides of 25-in. steel and concrete. It rests on bedrock...
Last week a lady made news when she sent some 200 tons of bricks by parcel post from Philadelphia to a U. S. Army reservation some 31 mi. southwest of Louisville. Ky. The lady was the Director of the U. S. Mint, Nellie Tayloe Ross. The bricks were about $200,000,000 in gold, the Government's first bullion shipment to its great new fortress-vault at Fort Knox...
Last week's shipment was surrounded with the greatest precautions. Mint guards, Post Office inspectors, Secret Servants toiled all one night under the direction of Madam Director Ross carting the precious canvas-wrapped bricks from the Philadelphia Mint. By next morning they had their precious load packed neatly in four mail coaches of a special nine-car train that was manned by crack machine gunners concealed behind drawn blinds. With right of way cleared, the train chuffed off on its 530-mi. journey. Several hundred yards in front of the gold train went a dummy freight train...
Although he uses characteristically generous language, the main impression conveyed by Dr. Canby is that The Mint is not worth the price asked for it. It is a book of about 200 pages, 9 in. by 10 in., which can be read through in half an hour...
...Arab leaders were broken, Lawrence refused his Colonial Office salary for six months, worked in an architect's office, went hungry, was down to 15 pence when he enlisted under the name of Ross. At night in the barracks he wrote the notes that make up The Mint, faithfully copying his companions' "indescribably profane and obscene conversation.'' Somewhat mysteriously Dr. Canby likens the result to Tom Brown's School Days, although he describes The Mint in terms that scarcely suggest Thomas Hughes's high-minded classic: "It is an old story:-the sadism...