Word: parks
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...started ticking in the dusky hour when Londoners yawn and struggle home in the crowded underground. Ever since the Hun dropped it on April 16, 1941, the 1,100-lb. time-bomb had been buried under 30 feet of earth in London's beautiful St. James's Park. Londoners had given it a nickname, "Annie"; and its site was officially noted. Throughout the changing weather of war, victory and peace, people hurried past it on the rebuilt Tarmac walk, and courting couples sat on the nearby lawns...
...dormant time fuse into action. No. 2 Bomb-Disposal Company, which had started to dig it out, declared that, unless the bomb blew itself up, it would have to be detonated. With a mental groan, Londoners kept thinking of that thing ticking away over in St. James's Park. Like all veterans, they were glad that the war was over, and yet the ticking of the bomb carried an echo of past excitement into the grouchy drabness of peace...
...Merry Monarch," tore himself away from his mistresses long enough to consider the stars. They must be, he decided, "anew observed, examined and corrected, for the use of his seamen." Forthwith he commanded "our trusty and well-beloved Sir Christopher Wren, Knight" to build "a small observatory within our park at Greenwich . . . with all convenient speed." Those were bargain days. Sir Christopher tore down a gatehouse in the Tower of London and a fort at Tilbury. With the salvaged stone and timber, and with ?520 from the sale of old gunpowder, he ran up a building on a grassy bank...
...time, in other respects, was not kind to Greenwich. Like an ugly fungus, London crept around King Charles's royal park. The city's smoke blinded the telescopes, corroded metal parts, covered lenses with soot. Electric railways interfered with magnetic observations. Worst were street lights, whose glare outshone the Milky Way. Only British astronomers could have hung on so long...
Noble Gesture. In Winter Park, Fla., a car parked in a garage 1) caught fire, 2) coughed into action, 3) neatly backed itself out, 4) burned up, 5) left the garage unscathed...