Word: ragtag
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Police Detective Charles S. Stenvig, 41, an independent with a ragtag organization, rolled over Republican City Council President Dan Cohen. Stenvig took city hall with 62% of the vote, amassing majorities of up to 81% in working-class areas. Cohen, 33, a Harvard Law School graduate, had the backing of the city's powerful labor leaders and the endorsement of big names, including Richard Nixon and Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy. Yet Stenvig carried all but two of the city's 13 wards. The result was all the more astonishing because, with a Negro population of just 3%, Minneapolis...
...Fairbanks employment office next morning resembled an army recruiting post during World War I. A ragtag army of bums, miners, Eskimos, fishermen, Athabascans, acidheads, and students had assembled in the building to defend civilization from an enemy that most of them had never seen. Many of the men were simply drifters whose luck had run out in Fairbanks and who wanted to earn enough money for the next month's grubstake. The government clerks passed any high school kid who could lie about his age with a straight face and any drunk who could look sober enough for a three...
...Ragtag Collection. Driving to the district capital of Lethem, the ranchers and some of their Amerindian employees struck at the airfield, where a 600-yard-long block of buildings houses the police station, power plant, post office and even a slaughterhouse. A cop ran from the station house, wrestled with Jim Hart for Hart's rifle; another rebel shot the cop from behind. When the shooting stopped, five policemen were dead. John Hawkins, a Protestant missionary from Texas, rushed to the airport and ran into Jim Hart. "We've talked enough -we're taking action," Hart shouted...
Someone managed to radio a report of the attack to Georgetown. In a ragtag collection of airplanes, about 226 of Guyana's 1,800-man defense force flew in and scattered the rebels. Guyana's ambassador to Venezuela, Novelist E. A. Braithwaite, handed the foreign ministry in Caracas a note written in words more angry than those of the gentle author of To Sir, With Love; the Venezuelans handed it back. As for the heirs of that old South Dakota pioneer, Ben Hart, they fled over the border to Venezuela. And the fine houses that the Harts built...
...village of Da Loc, in the Mekong Delta, seven civilians lay quietly in the mud. Cold rain dripped down their necks from the leaves of banana trees overhead. Suddenly, they spotted more than 20 black-pajama-clad figures creeping across the ripening paddies. At close range, the ragtag villagers opened fire with ancient rifles and M-l carbines. The Viet Cong attackers fled swiftly, leaving behind four dead and a prized Browning automatic rifle...