Word: peanuts
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...vital U.S. industry. It is a small, uneconomic business which assays at less than 1/1000 of the national income. But it has powerful friends-Congressmen and Senators from 23 wool-growing states, who can bleat as loudly as storm-whipped rams while trading support of bills to protect Southern peanut-growers for bills to protect Western sheep-raisers...
...believed in training youth. When Martha Berry, the famed Southern educator, asked him to contribute to her schools for Georgia mountain children (the story went), he sent her $1 with which she bought peanut seed, making a profit on the crop. Afterwards he built a Gothic quadrangle for her school, spending millions. He loved and collected the relics of the old, slow age which he had destroyed. In his Greenfield Village near Dearborn, he lovingly set up Abraham Lincoln's courthouse and the Menlo Park workshop of his hero, Thomas Edison. He filled his museum with stage coaches, buggies...
There were a couple of other posers. Britons in general do not like peanuts. And, said a circus man, "Our elephants have never seen a peanut in their lives; British people feed buns to elephants. If we give them rich, oily peanuts, they'll probably get sick...
Energetic Fritzie Zivic, onetime world's welterweight champion who had once licked pneumonia, Henry Armstrong and everything else in sight, began to retire-by slow degrees. He had three kids and enough money, he kept telling himself; he was always dabbling shrewdly in dry cleaning stores and peanut stands. He retired in Pittsburgh, retired again in California after his nose was pushed crooked again. His departure got so gradual it made the farewells of Patti, Sarah Bernhardt and Schumann-Heink look like hasty decisions...
Early in his career, as Georgia's Commissioner of Agriculture, he gambled $11,000 of state funds in the Chicago livestock market. He wanted to prove that Georgia's peanut-fed hogs were as good as the Midwest's corn-fed animals. He failed. But he bayed: "Sure I stole the money, but I stole it for you," and as a result was elected governor...