Word: potatoes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Irish air long heavy with the smell of dung heaps, peat bogs and the personal reek of an ill-kempt and poverty-ridden citizenry, a new and more awful odor arose. Sulphurous, acrid, "like the smell of foul water in a sewer," it came from the almost-ripened potato plants, lay so thick that in some places it was visible as a whitish cloud above them. Where it appeared, leaves turned first purplish-brown, then black; stems withered, so that they broke at the touch, oozing a pus-colored liquid; the potatoes, when dug, were soggy and black with putrescence...
Ridden by heavy taxes and a feudal system of landlordism, pinched by the British corn laws (which put a high tariff on imported grain, in favor of England's home-grown wheat), the Irish had been reduced to practical subsistence on the potato, and when that crop failed whole counties were left literally foodless. Governmental remedial machinery was slow, graft-ridden, stupidly conceived. While the famine lasted. 21,770 people died of starvation, the total Irish mortality for the five years that ended in 1851 was close upon a million. The two most important results were: a desperate stiffening...
...Americans are now a predominantly meat and potato eating people...
Pumpernickle Bill's car is a familiar sight on Pennsylvania roads. He averages about 30,000 miles a year, taking in Grange meetings, bee inspections, potato demonstrations. He has been writing his friendly column of anecdotes since the death in 1924 of Obediah Crouthamel (real name: Solomon DeLong), to whose column he was a contributor. Pumpernickle Bill's slogan is: "Fergess net, un schreib alsa mohl" (Don't forget to write sometime). A feature of his column is: "Glawwas Odder Net, Ow'r" (Believe It or Not). Sample...
...that proved the rule that he would never, so long as Hearst was HEARST, sell or disband a newspaper. But last week all rules were off in the Hearst empire of 26 newspapers, 13 magazines and assorted enterprises. The famed, New York American was dead, dropped like a cold potato. The queen-pin of his domain,* the paper that was called his journalistic "love child," on which he lavished money and affection and talent, was killed after a five-day conference...