Word: ragtag
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Every morning for months a ragtag line of Soviet citizens has formed outside the American embassy in Moscow, jamming the guarded main entrance and snaking 100 yards down Tchaikovsky Street. The crowds push and break into noisy arguments. On particularly rowdy days some desperate applicants offer Soviet policemen as much as 700 rubles ($1,120) to sneak them to the front of the queue. Soviet emigration, for so long a trickle, has turned into an avalanche. Each year for three years the number of emigres has doubled, and so far in 1989 some 80,000 Soviets have applied to leave...
...enjoying this, you should get a real job." The mood is infectious, whether it is .300-hitting first baseman Mark Grace describing the pennant race as "really neat" or rookie phenom Dwight Smith likening the season to a "dream." Only one thing stands between the Cubs and ecstasy: the ragtag St. Louis Cardinals, managed by Whitey Herzog, the game's resident genius...
...varying degrees, Pedro Joaquin's survivors came to believe that the ragtag band of rebels known as the Sandinista National Liberation Front might be the key to dislodging Somoza. When Somoza, stung by barbed headlines like HIRED ASSASSINS or TIME TO CLENCH FISTS, ordered La Prensa's office bombed by an airplane and shelled by an armored vehicle, the Chamorros lent the Sandinistas $50,000. Dona Violeta believes the money was used to fund the assault on the National Palace in August 1978. The loan was never repaid...
...does not satisfy her, and neither does her husband Matthew, an ambitious lawyer and tepid bedmate ("What's good enough for missionaries is good enough for me"). So Sandra does what any woman in her fix would do: she runs off with Jack Stubbs, the trumpet player in a ragtag band called the Citronella Jumpers...
...until Wednesday was a ragtag fleet in full operation. A team from Washington, consisting of Secretary of Transportation Samuel Skinner, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William Reilly and Coast Guard Commandant Paul Yost, flew to Alaska at midweek and reported back to Bush that the cleanup was going well enough that there was no need for the Federal Government to take over. That seemed to be a polite way of saying there was no way for the feds to speed things, so Washington might as well stay out and avoid sharing the blame for what the President called a major tragedy...