Word: percheron
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Jedediah Purdy, 24, may have been born in the 1970s, but he grew up in the 1870s. Home was a hillside West Virginia farm plowed by a team of Percheron draft horses. School was his parents' kitchen, his neighbors' fields. Town was a country crossroads with two stores, and entertainment a new book from the library. And though the young man with the Old Testament name and the Mark Twain upbringing later went on to study at Harvard and Yale, mixing with the privileged and the trend-conscious, his heart remained in the hills, beneath the oaks...
Once I went to a bar called the Mixers on Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis with a woman who was 20, like me, and who drank enough whiskey sours to founder a Percheron. My hopes rose with every glass she took, and when she finally asked me to take her home, I assumed that the joyful moment was at hand. She leaned against me when I got her in the car, green around the gills, her eyes unfocused when I kissed her, and I realized that we had overshot the mark. Liquor had reduced her judgment to where her affection...
...winter there were only 13 Fifty-Niners left on the Susitna, and what a winter they had. On Christmas Eve, Steve Pankiewicz's mare Ruby, a Percheron draft horse, fell 20 ft. into a well. All night long the men worked to dig the horse out of the frozen gravel, and by 4 a.m. they were finished. They earned Shorty's grudging admiration. "Those people did something nobody ever did before in this country," he allowed. "They got a horse in a well and got it out alive." Later that winter Bertha Donaldson fell...
...first of the company's Percheron rockets, named after a French draft horse, is being built in a Sunnyvale, Calif., plant by 17 engineers, some of them former employees of NASA. This week the device will be loaded aboard a flatbed truck and hauled to a launch pad at Matagorda Island, about 50 miles northeast of Corpus Christi, Texas, a site that NASA once considered for launches. After testing the prototype, the company hopes to conduct its first orbital flight next year...
...save money, Hudson's designers have cut out many of the back-up systems that NASA rockets use. Space agency officials worry about the resulting risks. Hannah points out, however, that his company carries $25 million in flight-liability insurance to cover any mishap. If a runaway Percheron came down in, say, the Houston Astrodome, $25 million might not even begin to cover the costs...