Word: mule
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Daveron's repugnance to mules had a foundation that was laid in 1942. That was the year the U.S. Rubber Development Corp., desperately trying to boost Amazonian rubber production for war, decided that the seringueiros (rubber workers) needed mules for jungle transportation, and bought 1,800 of them in Sao Paulo State, in southern Brazil. But moving them 3,500 miles northwest (as the mule files) turned out to be the biggest part of the problem. An ex-canned-goods salesman, abetted by a lottery-ticket salesman and a former bus driver, gave up the job after losing more...
Daveron, who knew the jungles, stepped in. First, he set up a mule hospital, treated maggot-infested wounds (from sharp jungle grass) with crude-oil rubs. With local gauchos he rounded up the strays and drove the troop to better pasture...
...woods for the frolic like ants out of an old log when t'other end's afire. [Then] an old Hardshell preacher* come a-walkin in out of nowhar in the dark, with his mouth mortised into his face in a shape like a mule's hoof, heels down. . . . Like all Hardshells, he was dead agin women and lovely sounds and motions and dancin and cussin and kissin. [But] the whiskey part of the frolic he had nothin agin...
...country road outside Atlanta one day in 1945, a well-dressed man stopped his car to watch a farmer and his son laboriously grading a small field with the help of a decrepit old mule. The sight was a common one in the South, and it was not new to Robert Marion Strickland, 50, president of Atlanta's Trust Co. of Georgia (main Coca-Cola bank). But he had just been visiting a well-heeled farmer friend who had cleared and graded a 30,000-acre farm in a short time with heavy machinery. Bob Strickland decided...
Years of jamming buses through Manhattan traffic have given many a driver ulcers, a sulphurous vocabulary, the voice of a mule skinner and a wild ambition-to drive the whole route without stopping. None ever make it, but all pass up wind-chilled passengers with maniacal glee. On a slushy winter morning a good driver, as he speeds past, can hit as many as a dozen fist-flourishing bystanders with the spray from his wheels. Years of diving through elbowing passengers to collect the 10? fares has given many a conductor the temperament of a yegg; most ram their nickel...