Word: potatoe
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...duty in the G.I. mess hall at fancy-pants Fort Myer, Va., just across the Potomac from Washington, Pfc. Andrew God Jr. was supposed to be peeling potatoes. But like many a soldier before him on many another potato pile, Soldier God, a Detroit architect before the draft caught him, was fairly hacking the daylights out of the spuds, so his mess sergeant reported him for goofing off. Sent up before Captain Thomas Woods, his commanding officer, for disciplinary action, Pfc. God refused a company-punishment sentence of two hours of hard labor every day for 14 days, demanded...
...prosecution's case was clear enough. The mess sergeant testified that Pfc. God, knife in hand, had removed the eyes in thick wedges, sliced off random peels in flat slabs (instead of removing them nice and thin). Then the mess sergeant, armed with a potato and peeler, earnestly re-enacted the whole business, slashing ruthlessly away until the potato looked like a candidate for a shoestring...
...stronger, and just as reminiscent of TV's Sergeant Bilko and his Fort Baxter friends. A mess sergeant from another company earnestly testified that Pfc. God's peelings were quite normal, considering that the accused had had only a knife to work with instead of a hand potato-peeler. Moreover, defense counsel (an officer picked for the job) was able to prove that Pfc. God's peelings (saved as evidence by the company commander) weighed less than those carved by his own mess sergeant...
...slum of Cato Manor to the west, where, ever since the Union government forbade blacks to drink anything alcoholic other than the watery government beer served in municipal bars, Zulu women have been brewing a crude moonshine of their own. A high-power popskull made of methylated spirits, carbide, potato peels or just about anything else that will ferment, this local version of skokiaan (called gavine) is often the only source of income for the "Shebeen Queens" who make it. Last week, when the Durban city council started transferring the people of Cato Manor to a new apartheid village farther...
...Taratufo (Operation Spud), as the Communists called it. Many waved crude signs denouncing the Italian government and the European Common Market. Communist agitators in the crowd also put the blame on U.S. President Eisenhower (on the ungrounded thesis that U.S. wheat shipments for needy Italian children had undermined the potato market). Actually, low prices were the result of a local surplus, panicky farmers' hasty dumping on the market, and above all, the tight squeeze of the Camorra, the middlemen-racketeers who dominate farm-produce distribution in the Naples area (TIME, April...