Word: nantucket
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...rapt audience at Baltimore's Goucher College, Novelist Carson (The Member of the Wedding) McCullers streamed through her consciousness, trying to tell the strange tale of how she and Playwright Tennessee Williams converted Member into a Broadway hit one summer on Nantucket Island. "Ten's not a cook and I'm not a cook, and the house kind of went to pieces," recalled Carson in a kind of far away tone. "We ate mostly pea soup with wienies in it, I guess, and the cat had kittens on my bed. There were milk bottles and whisky bottles...
...Book. A young investment broker named William Baker helped ease the blow of Shirley's divorce. He had met the Gardners during a Nantucket vacation, and when he heard of the divorce, began calling on Shirley. Within four months they were married, although Baker was no longer a broker but a corporal in the U.S. Army. When Tomorrow the World closed, Shirley camp-followed her husband through the South until 1945, then returned to Manhattan for her first musical, Hollywood Pinafore, in which she played the part of a gossip columnist called Louhedda Hopsons. During the war years, Shirley...
Author Stackpole follows the old Nantucket industry to its peak in the 1830s, when the search for whales had long since taken the ships into the Pacific. There, Stackpole believes, a Nantucket master named Captain Christopher Burdick deserves credit for being the first to sight the Antarctic continent. Others discovered new islands, gave them Nantucket family names, e.g., Gardner, Starbuck and Swain Islands...
Sometimes the God-fearing men of Nantucket were unable to get over the sight of the Pacific and its paradisial isles. The old records contain stories of men who left their ships and settled down with native women. Once, in 1824, a whole shipload of men mutinied, killed the officers of the Globe, and set up a short-lived kingdom on Mili Island...
Stackpole stops his story before the petroleum boom came along to supply most of the world's need for oil. But even before that, the clouds were gathering over Nantucket. Stubborn sand bars drove captains to New Bedford and other ports; the appeal of the Gold Rush drew crewmen to California. But if the oldtime whaling man disappeared, he left a record behind him, as Author Stackpole notes, as citizen of the world, man of industry, oceanographer and as "a sea-hunter whose exploits make ... a bright page in American history...