Word: mule
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Coleman acquired a deposit in California's Death Valley. In 120° heat he began mining borax in the valley 280 ft. below sea level. To transport the ore over jagged peaks and through the desert to Mojave, Calif., he formed the famed 20-mule team (actually 18 mules and two horses), was soon hauling out 2,500,000 tons of ore annually...
...Mule-Power Farms. Moreover, said Fleming, the U.S. is not really selling about half of the exported cotton; it is giving it away or exchanging it for soft currencies or covered by long-term soft loans. He estimated that some $100 million of such losses should be added to the outright subsidy in this year's export program, which he figured out at $536 million. On top of $636 million, he added $150 million in cotton soil-bank payments this year, $80 million in general Agriculture Department expenses for cotton, and $290 million in artificially inflated raw-material costs...
...expensive price-support system, said Fleming, has tended to keep cotton' production in the old, uneconomic mule-power farms of the Southeast, while retarding the natural shift of cotton growing to the low-cost, highly productive tractorized flatland farms of the South and of the irrigated Southwest and West. This keeps cotton prices so high that they provide an umbrella for foreign growers and a powerful incentive for consumers to shift to synthetic fibers. To cure the situation, Fleming advocated gradual reductions in U.S. cotton price-support levels, gradual removal of U.S. acreage controls, and gradual lifting...
...Music with ambitions of becoming a professional concert baritone. "But the folks was havin' to scratch and grind for a few bucks," so Ernie went back to odd radio jobs. In California he joined Hillbilly Cliffie Stone's local show, Hometown Jamboree, and made some records (Mule Train, Shotgun Boogie) that led to a guest appearance in Las Vegas. "I was scared to death to play before an audience of sophisticates and gamblers." In 1955, with his driving, metronome sense of rhythm, he recorded a coal miner's bitter lament called Sixteen Tons ("Saint Peter...
From Aeronautical Wizard Igor Sikorsky came a wry glance into yesteryear and a full-faced peek into the future. Said he, at a Washington banquet: "The first instrument of transport was developed when man placed a load on his woman's back. Then came the pack mule. Now the day is at hand when a crane helicopter will be able to pick up a ready-made house, deliver it to its site while the owners are inside having dinner...