Word: newts
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Russia: "A giant with the head of a newt...
Each spring since 1918, when Benzie County (Mich.) Clerk Newt Ely found the creek near his house green with smelt struggling upstream from Lake Michigan to spawn, fishermen have flocked to brooks around the Great Lakes, have taken in 8,000,000 pounds of smelt annually. Softspoken, bespectacled William J. Duchaine, managing editor of the Escanaba Daily Press and the town's unofficial pressagent, sniffed a chance for the town to recoup its losses in local mining and lumbering declines. Having initiated Escanabans to profit-making outdoor fun with logrolling contests, deer hunters' powwows, he sold the town...
...Captain van Toch, blue-eyed, beery Dutch mariner, trading for pearls along the coast of Sumatra, made the first discovery: he found, in a little-visited bay on one of the islands, a family of giant newts that walked erect when on land, could be taught to use a pearl-diver's knife and other tools, and could even, with coaching, learn to talk. Finished rubbing his eyes, simple-minded van Toch planned merely to use his pets for pearl-fishing, but he had to get capital to do it, and once capital got involved in the thing there...
...author chose the faintly ridiculous, wildly improbable newt as the subject of his extravaganza must remain a mystery. Why he ends the book so indeterminately is easier to answer: he found he had bitten off more in the way of Wellsian fantasy than he could chew. Through the rest of the book, however, he does give about as copious a working-out of the satiric possibilities of his theme as could possibly be wished for, and while in some parts of this the creaking of the Capek brain is depressingly almost audible, in others-particularly those dealing with the grave...
...Newt Holley (Walter Brennan) planned to serenade his son Ernie (Joel McCrea) and the latter's bride Pearl (Barbara Stanwyck) with St. Louis Blues on their wedding night. He felt the tune might be a kind of charm to bring him a grandbaby. Newt never got to play the tune that night because Ernie ran away after he had knocked a man into the river for trying to kiss the bride.' When Ernie finally came home again he quarreled so with Pearl that she went to New Orleans with an itinerant photographer (Walter Catlett). Following...