Word: pits
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...winning car at Indianapolis is the one that combines top speed with a minimum time in the pits-a good pit crew can refuel and change all four tires in 30 seconds. For the past two years the winner has been the bright yellow, 380-h.p. Belond Special, designed, built and owned by Mechanic George Salih of Whittier, Calif. Salih took the standard four-cylinder Offenhauser engine used in most Indianapolis cars, installed it on its side at an 18° angle for cooler running and lower center of gravity. The idea was so successful that...
...start of the film is striking. The hero, a young Negro (Harry Belafonte), is trapped by a mine cave-in. Five days later he digs his way back to the surface. "I made it!" he shouts in triumph, but nobody replies. The pit head is deserted. The town is deserted. The highways are deserted as the hero, panic-stricken, goes speeding off toward Manhattan, the nearest big city, in the first car he finds. At the Hudson River he is stopped short. The George Washington Bridge is jammed to the rails with abandoned automobiles, all arrested in a desperate plunge...
Cause of the fire was a defective shutoff valve in the oil burner which failed to function, causing the overflowing oil to ignite in the pit. Deputy Fire Chief Vincent Galvin declared, "It could have been a dangerous situation if it got out of the boiler room...
Death by the Pit. When St. Francis Xavier and a small group of Portuguese Jesuits introduced the Japanese to Christianity in 1549, their success was striking: in only a little more than a generation there were between 300,000 and 600,000 Christians in the country, which had only a third of its present 91.6 million population. (About half a million are now Christian.) Buddhism was in decline; people were impressed by the Jesuits' European science and their surprising concern for social morality and the sanctity of human life. The success of the new religion soon convinced Japan...
When decapitation and crucifixion were not effective, the shoguns invented tsurushi, in which the victim was suspended head downward in a pit, often partly filled with offal, to hang in agony sometimes a week or more before dying. "The persecuters were well aware that entire districts would be depopulated if all Christians were killed," says Drummond, "and so from the beginning they aimed to make apostates rather than martyrs." Many Japanese preferred to give up their Christianity. But a surprising number held out to the death. In Shimabara 36,000 men, women and children, offered the way to freedom...