Word: naphtha
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Harsen Smith had long thought in terms of family. The Chris-Craft business itself is a closely knit family enterprise. It was founded in 1894 by Harsen's grandfather, Christopher Columbus Smith, when he installed a naphtha-gas engine in a homemade rowboat and began selling rides. Today, 54 members of the Smith family still firmly control and share in the direction of the company he started...
...Chris married Anna Rattray in 1884, ne settled down to raise a family-four boys, two girls. As soon as the youngsters were old enough to hold a clamp, he set them to work in the waterfront boat shop. In 1896, two years after his success with his first naphtha-gas boat, he and Hank tried a 2-h.p. Sintz gasoline engine. "It never ran well," says Chris's son Jay, 74, "until Charles Sintz showed up from Grand Rapids two years later with a gadget he called a carburetor...
Hearing about the Guard call on prison radios, Myles and Smart herded their 18 handcuffed hostages, including Prison Sociologist Walter Jones, into a pair of cell cages in the third tier. On the bars above and around the sides, the ringleaders stationed convicts with jugs of naphtha from the laundry. Their orders: at the first noise of an attack from outside, pour the naphtha on the hostages, light it. "We'll burn 'em," shrieked a convict from the wall, and Warden Powell got word from inside that they meant...
Under the Jug. For two nights and a day the hostages huddled under the naphtha jugs. Around them, convicts hopped up on dispensary narcotics and kitchen-made "pruno" alcohol brandished their meat axes and jittered wildly. Rawboned Sociologist Jones, 24, was twice sent out to tell Powell that any move would mean death to the hostages, and to report convict grievances (bucket toilets, young prisoners mixed with older men, a hated state parole commissioner). "It's tighter than hell," he said. "They're shook." Once he went back, as he had promised, to sit under the jugs...
...Warden Powell heard over his ever-working prison grapevine that Myles had decided to burn the hostages. He acted quickly, led a 50-guardsmen bazooka, machine-gun and rifle attack. The first bazooka "V-O-O-R-O-O-M" so shook the cons that they got only one naphtha jug poured, never got it lit before machine guns scared them away. Wept one guard: "It was like getting your life back again...