Word: mule
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...years ago in Nova Scotia, Jim Williams was taken as a baby to Detroit, where he grew up, spent one year half-heartedly studying art at Mount Union College. At 15, big and husky as a man, he quit school to roam the Southwest as ranch hand, camp cook, mule skinner, tattoo artist. He was a crack rider with the 15th Cavalry at Fort Sill, Okla. Mustered out, he married, smashed baggage at Chicago's old Northwestern railroad station, got a broken nose as a professional prize fighter, finally settled down as a machinist's assistant...
...long on religion. At Lawrenceburg, the county seat, Farmer Joe Brady went on trial last week for religion's sake. Reason: he had fetched no medical aid for his wife Unice when she lay ill of pneumonia last fall. "I told her I'd sell the mule, get a doctor and some medicine if she wanted it," said deep-voiced Joe Brady. "But Unice wouldn't hear to it and she died with the Lord's praises on her lips...
Next day rain turned rutted clay roads into warm red gumbo. But the Cedar Springs Church of God, to which all the defendants belong, had its biggest turnout in months. Family after family came in by mule and foot, over foot bridge and mountain trail, the man first, his arms full of quilt and baby, next a passel of children, then the woman, carrying the next to youngest. As a kerosene lamp flung shifting shadows on the plain pine walls, the congregation rejoiced, with prayers, a rousing sermon, hymn singing to Defendant McGehee's guitar...
This year their troubles start when they go to a hospital with suitcases labeled M.D. (Mule Drivers), are mistaken for two medicos, end in jail. The show is garnished with such slapstick as putting a patient to sleep by letting him smell an old shoe, such gags as "Your head sets on one end of your spine and you set on the other." Silas gets broad at times, but never really dirty. What keeps it moving are its dances and specialty acts, its gold-toothed but good-looking chorus...
...Columbia and Mule Day, past the great plantation houses, the slave cabins, the knobby-legged colts and lamb-sprinkled meadows of middle Tennessee; on to St. Louis (750 postmasters and roast lamb) where he went in the wrong door of the Statler Hotel, surprising a letter-carriers' band facing the other...