Word: ostrich
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...more pleased than South Africa's ostrich king, 78-year-old Max Rose, who owns 8,000 birds. He sleeps by day in a hotel room in Oudtshoorn, breakfasts at midnight in his big, untidy office, heaped high with bundles of ostrich feathers, and works while others sleep. Max Rose, who has made & lost fortunes in feathers, is now apparently going to make another...
Baby Sitting. Until 1867, ostriches ran wild. South Africans believed that leathers of captive birds wouldn't curl. An Englishman named Arthur Douglass broke that myth. He not only produced curly feathers from tame birds, but also devised an incubator to hatch the three-pound egg. Others quickly took up ostrich raising (some paid native girls to take turns sitting on the eggs). Traders swarmed out to the scattered farms, offering cartloads of oil lamps, stoves and feminine finery in exchange for plumes, fashionable in late Victorian and Edwardian days...
...feather trade was bringing in $5,000,000 a year, second only to Kimberley's diamond mines. Wild speculation broke out in land and feathers. Prices flew up to $500 a lb. in 1913, before the inevitable crash. Many an ostrich tycoon went to bed a millionaire and woke up bankrupt. Some of them trekked southward to raise oranges; the gaudy Victorian mansions they had built slowly fell to pieces in a weird jumble of white gables and green cupolas. Max Rose, who came to South Africa from Lithuania in 1890, was one of the few ex-millionaires...
...keep his flock together, cashed in on each tiny feather boomlet as it appeared. In 1931, the Empress Eugenie hat style started a flurry in feathers. In 1947, Great Britain's Queen Elizabeth helped start the present revival by visiting Oudtshoorn, praising feathers and publicly plucking an ostrich. This year, Manhattan's Walter Florell ("the mood at the moment is to look bold") is trimming hats with Lillian Russell-sized plumes (see cut). But he has tuned them to the 20th Century by coating them with copper, rust and gold lacquers. Other Florell eye openers: one-foot-square...
...Rigidly monogamous, a pair of ostriches may spend their full 40-year adult life span together. Easily frightened, the birds, which can run at a 60 m.p.h. clip, sometimes cripple themselves dashing headlong into fences. But in the mating season a male ostrich will attack a man, can disembowel him with a single downward kick of his two-toed foot, whose claw is the size of a railroad spike...