Word: plank
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...followed by a straining sensation, a feeling of pressure, a cracking sound, and a terrific wrench. . . . Something broke with a dull noise. . . . Each cracking sound reminded me of taking the lid off a jamjar, while the process as a whole was like splitting open a wooden packing case, plank by plank...
California gold and Nevada silver built the mansions on Nob Hill (where Mark Twain dreamed of living some day), bought the elegant, satin-lined carriages that rolled over San Francisco's plank streets. They paid for San Franciscans' one-pound gold watches, their champagne (seven bottles to Bostonians' one), their imported building stone from China, accounted as well for San Francisco's 1,000 yearly suicides...
Speaking last week at Asbury Park, N. J., pure-hearted Frank Murphy made sounds very much like a man planing a 1940 political plank. He viewed with alarm "the astonishing total of approximately 4,000,000 Government employes receiving in salaries nearly $6,000,000,000 a year ! " Then he pointed with pride and sympathy at 30,000,000 U. S. families whose average income is $1,500. "I am convinced," he cried, "that it is the average families, in the main, who foot the bill for this enormous pay roll. . . . Thirteen percent of a family's annual income...
...pleased to recall that they had a mutual friend in Felix Frankfurter, whom Archie MacLeish encountered at Harvard Law School, which graduated him in 1919 with top honors. For FORTUNE in 1935 he wrote The Case Against Roosevelt, unearthing from Massachusetts' constitution the basic American tenet (a prime plank of the Republican platform in 1936) that U. S. government shall be government of laws, not of men. A successful lawyer who turned poet (in 1923) as calculatedly as some lawyers turn politician, who made good at it by winning a Pulitzer Prize (Conquistador, 1933) and who supported his muse...
...most cases," says she, "the ideal plan to challenge a young hopeful . . . would be to send him or her to a practical school of technical training (if one exists) where the pupils are taught to drive a nail straight, or saw a plank, miter a few corners and plane the surface of rough wood until the hands become used to holding and directing tools...