Word: pit
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Looking at it from the other end. a spaceship that starts its voyage on the surface of a planet has a hard time climbing out of its gravitational pit. Once it has reached untroubled space, it can coast for millions of miles on its unopposed momentum...
Near the rim of the earth's gravitational pit is a much smaller pit belonging to the moon. An object shot away from the earth at 24,800 m.p.h. will reach the boundary, about 34,000 miles short of the moon, where the moon's pull is as strong as the earth's. If it reaches this point with a small velocity, it will fall on the moon. If it crosses the line at good speed, it will shoot past the moon, its course merely deflected. This is what happened to the Lunik...
...Foot Pit. Hurrying home to his tiny, rented straw-mat room in an overcrowded shack on the city's outskirts, Kawamura eagerly told his fellow tenants what he had learned. Sure enough, they remembered that there was an old tombstone in the field, so deeply buried that only its top showed above the earth. Nobody knew whose grave it was. It had always been there...
...much bigger job than he-had expected. By noon Kawamura had dug down 6 ft. of earth and uncovered one face of the tombstone-a massive slab 1 ft. thick and 4 ft. wide. Apparently bent on a rest, he started to clamber out of the 6-ft. pit. But. at just that moment, the huge gravestone toppled forward and crashed down on the luckless Kawamura. What the fortuneteller had prophesied had, in a fashion, come to pass: Kawamura's bad luck was at last at an end. He was dead...
...That was in 1934, and since then Composer-Conductor Engel has had a hand in such diverse Broadway shows as Maurice Evans' Hamlet, The Trojan Women, A Streetcar Named Desire (for which he wrote incidental music), The Consul and Li'l Abner (for which he served as pit conductor...