Word: pleasanton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...plant (180,000 kw.) abuilding for Chicago's Commonwealth Edison Co.; costs already exceed that by an estimated $20 million. By the time it is finished, G.E. will be $80 million in the hole on its nuclear program, including a smaller 5,000-kw. plant it built at Pleasanton, Calif, to get experience. G.E., like the others, thinks that if it could build three big plants in a row, it could learn enough to produce competitive power. But G.E. has no plans at the moment. As one reactor builder says: "Private industry has found that there is no money...
...Rather Be In Jail." Around Pleasanton, Kans. (pop. 1,200), Hall's father was regarded as a fine lawyer but a hard man who once exacted as his fee in a homicide case his acquitted client's whole 600-acre farm. Carl Austin Hall had a mentally deficient older brother who died at five in a mental institution, sent there because "the folks didn't want Carl brought up around him." But as a boy, Carl himself was always in trouble, always trying to cheat someone, always bragging about how he would one day make big money...
...parents dead, Carl Hall went back to Pleasanton to receive a $200,000 inheritance which included a large home and 1,170 acres of fertile Missouri and Kansas farm land. He sold the family property as fast as possible. "Sentiment," said he, "don't mean a damn thing to me." Pleasanton was too small for Carl Hall. "People got their noses up at me," he complained. "They're jealous because I got money. I'll show 'em how money and brains can really get goin...
With that, he went off with the wife of a Pleasanton businessman and took her to Kansas City, where, after her divorce, he married her. He used to come back to Pleasanton in a Cadillac convertible with men whom he fatuously introduced as "my broker" and "my lawyer." During the next four years, he lost money playing the stock market, in liquor-store ventures and in an airplane crop-dusting business. He drank and gambled. His wife left him. He turned to passing bad checks in hospitals, and then to holding up cab drivers. In 1952, he went...
Years ago, Carl Hall had told the postmaster of Pleasanton: "My hands are white as lilies-and you'll never see a callus on them." In his way, he had kept his promise...