Word: piers
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...body of literature about the Harvard Summer School is small and, alas, not particularly distinguished. It consists, in fact, of one book--a light romantic novel, written in 1899 by one Arthur Stanwood Pier and called The Pedagogues: A Story of the Harvard Summer School. The Pedagogues has understandably failed to earn for itself a lasting place in American literature; it is an inconsequential tale about various romantic misalliances in a Summer School English composition class populated by small-town high school teachers. It has very little sweeping design or extraordinary depth or memorable character-portrayal or that sort...
...compelling character study, because it isn't. The dialogue is wooden and the action, after a while, predictable--everyone falls in love with the person they should rightfully fall in love with in the end. What touches of sophistication and subtlety The Pedagogues does have comes in the way Pier refuses to make his characters all good or all bad. Each acts out of understandable motives and therefore has our sympathy, but the reasons they don't like each other are just as understandable...
...curious how badly Harvard comes off in The Pedagogues, since like most books about Harvard it appears to set out to be adulatory and in fact to use Harvard as an attractive gimmick to make people read what would be an otherwise dull book. Pier is constantly going to great lengths to have his characters say how much they enjoy their six weeks in Summer School, how glamorous and exciting Cambridge is, how sincere and diligent they are about their studies. At the end practically everybody agrees that they have just finished the most blissful summer of their lives. Pier...
...more than eighteen boats, large and small, that go out from Boston Harbor on a regular basis. The Salvatore and other small boats fish in the Harbor itself or the Quincy bay and sell the fish daily directly to the many fish markets that line the fish pier. The bigger boats can go out for several days at a stretch and auction off their fish on return. Prices fluctuate with competition: the more boats that come in on one day, the less fish is worth per pound. Prices are also affected by how much fish is trucked in from Canada...
Then Glomar Explorer, her beam too wide for the Panama Canal, sailed round the Horn and made for Los Angeles, where she rendezvoused with her companion, HMB-1. Fittingly, Glomar Explorer docked at Long Beach's Pier E, which is located only about 50 yds. from the hangar that for years has housed Hughes' gigantic plywood flying boat, known irreverently as "the Spruce Goose." Though Howard Hughes last month finally agreed to dispose of the Goose, giving parts of it to the Smithsonian, it remains at present in the hangar, a monument to his single-minded determination...