Word: perched
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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What the announcer was reporting from his eyewitness perch to intent listeners all over Alaska was not an impending natural disaster, but the Alaskan equivalent of the Irish Sweepstakes: the yearly pool on when the ice would break up in the Tanana River at the little town of Nenana, southwest of Fairbanks. This year hopefuls all over the 49th state and Canada's Yukon Territory (no tickets are sold to "outsiders") bought 170,000 tickets at $1 apiece for a chance to guess the exact day, hour and minute of the breakup. The exact minute is determined...
...Potomac's Columbia Island Marina, pleasure boats bake like muffins in the sun. Women in shorts and bare-chested men sweat over engines, hulls and brightwork. Strung along the docks here and there, families perch like terns as they munch their sandwiches, while over at the launching ramp, a black-and-white Pontiac with a black-and-white outboard runabout in tow backs tortuously toward the water. Pontiac and runabout have matching upholstery, matching fins, matching wraparound windshields...
...treetopped village (pop. 1,200) of Algonac, Mich, on the St. Clair River. Algonac was a tough sailors' town situated in the midst of busy Great Lakes maritime commerce. There were a few small hotels, a general store, plenty of canvasback and redhead ducks, walleyed pike, yellow perch, black bass and an occasional sturgeon-and lots of sitting...
This precarious perch for man's soul is a long way from traditional Christian belief. Paul Tillich. Reinhold Niebuhr said once, "is trying to walk a fence between man's doubts and the traditions of man's faith. He walks the fence with great virtuosity, and if he slips a bit to one side or the other, it is hardly noticed by us humble pedestrians." There are many humble and not-so-humble pedestrians who think that no man who calls himself a Christian has any business on the fence in the first place. A fence...
...must learn to expect anything. An old lady in Washington, D.C. asked the repairman to run the new telephone wire through her parakeet's cage so that he "would have something interesting to perch on" (refused). A Chicago woman insisted on having her wall telephone four inches from the floor so that she would be forced to exercise while bending to answer it (granted). One telephone man was called to a Chicago hotel to repair a badly frayed cord, discovered the cause of the trouble as he was leaving: sitting in the bathtub was a pet lion...