Word: porcelains
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...from Fairbanks International Airport back to the smokejumper base, the firefighters underwent a period of cultural shock. They became high on novelty. Inside the truck, they felt like monsters caged for the first time with a crew of other wild apes. They suddenly discovered upholstered chairs instead of logs, porcelain plates instead of tin cans ... silverware, firm ground, women, bright colors, music boxes. The clean, fragile people around them in the town were tense; they walked in odd bursts of nervous movement and talked too quickly...
...joke, really," says San Francisco Dealer Dorothy Dubovsky. There is nothing funny, though, about the price of some of these minor treasures. It is virtually impossible to buy a genuine brass spittoon because all but a few are already ensconced in places of honor in private homes. The porcelain heads used by phrenologists 70 years ago ($350) and the brightly colored enamel coffee pots of the 1890s ($75) are so scarce that manufacturers are now busily and cheaply reproducing them. Fancy china Jim Beam bourbon bottles, cranked out in limited quantities in the 1950s and early '60s as gift...
...Terribles were undaunted; they had a secret weapon that had never failed to take the day-marbles hand-carved from the finest porcelain commodes. Toucan Captain Len Smith, 50, winner of nine world championships, explained that only porcelain gives the "tolley" (shooter) the proper heft and feel. Every Toucan tolley is custom carved to fit the knuckle, but none has a diameter greater than .75 in.-the dimension prescribed by the British Marbles Board of Control...
...Good Friday last, a jolly throng turned out to see if American mettle could match Toucan porcelain. But the colonial question had unfortunately been resolved by default: the Americans failed to show. Still, the Toucans were presented an immediate threat by the Johnson Jets of nearby Langley Green, who "killed" Smith in the first round by slamming his tolley off the pitch. But Len's son Alan saved Toucan face by knuckling ten straight hits to lead the Terribles to a 25-20 victory and their 13th consecutive championship. The battle done, Terribles and challengers alike repaired...
...President (though a Democrat), has succeeded Lyndon Johnson. "All those damn Indians," as one rubbernecker inelegantly described George Catlin's incomparable frontier paintings, have been banished from the upstairs corridor. Pieces from the White House vermeil collection have replaced Lady Bird Johnson's personal collection of porcelain birds, and a wooden gavel inscribed to the President, a gift from the Mayor of Vincennes, Ind., rests on an end table...