Word: mule
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Most of the cotton South's 1,700,000 tenant farmers live by The Book, and The Book is not the Holy Bible. It is a ledger where "furnish" is entered. Furnish is credit for "side meat" (salt pork), molasses, corn meal, seed, sometimes for a mule and a plow. Landlords, or merchants dependent upon them, run The Book. Without furnish, few tenants could live through the winter, or plant in the spring...
...helping conductors whip scenes into shape. Eventually, if he shows talent, he is allowed to conduct an opera or two. Only after a long term as a full-fledged opera conductor does he attempt the exacting business of conducting a symphony orchestra. Conducting opera is like driving a 20-mule team, gives an ideal training for conductors. A Brahms symphony holds no technical terrors for a man who is able to keep a badly-rehearsed chorus, five or six erratic singers and an orchestra in the same place at the same time...
...Robertson's Shady Lawn Tourist Camp outside of Nashville, Tenn. was one of the South's most talkative, most anachronistic minority groups-500 itinerant Irish horse traders, the Rileys and Costellos, the O'Haras, Carrolls and Sherlocks. During the winter they travel round from one mule market to another, running down the animals of other people and commenting enthusiastically on the good points of their own. During the summer they live in tourist camps and see the world. Once a year, on May 1. they get together just outside of Nashville for the festive Irish purpose...
Bridget and Katie Costello, Jimmy Carroll, Jimmy McNally, Petie and Bridget Riley had died in various Southern towns since May 1, 1937. Their bodies had been shipped to undertakers in the vicinity, to be kept against the next spring buryings. When the last April mule market closed, the Irishmen put their families into their cars, mostly new ones with trailers, and set out for Mrs. Robertson's. They maintain stoutly that they are not a clan, just a large group of countrymen with a common trade. No one knows how the meetings started, but they have been going...
...after the foal arrived, lop-eared Leonardo Cedano, 30, a Calero stablehand, became morose. Standing outside a public bar, he bellowed: "People are saying that the baby mule born yesterday is my son." Then he popped a skyrocket into his mouth, touched a lighted cigaret to the fuse. A moment later it exploded. His face and mouth were horribly mutilated. Within half an hour he died...