Word: railroads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Henry David Thoreau beat Donald MacDonald to plywood sleepers more than 100 years ago, when he wrote in Walden: "I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and . . . get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free...
...post-Civil War years: "He was born into a time when all young men of his age caught the fever of speculation, and expected to get on in the world by the omission of some of the regular processes which have been appointed from of old." What railroad men and land speculators were to the 1870s, investment bankers and risk arbitragers are to the 1980s. Perhaps a , modern-day Thorstein Veblen could explain the eagerness with which moneymen like Boesky vied with one another in acquiring the luxurious trappings of a baronial life-style. But the insider-trading scandal...
About 50 blacks armed with axes and sticks then began marching from the headquarters building of the Congress of South African Trade Unions to the nearby Doornfontein railroad station. Police tried to disperse them, then teargassed them. The marchers attacked the officers with knives, clubs and machetes, according to police. The police answered by opening fire, killing three protesters and wounding five more, and then followed a trail of blood back to the union headquarters and besieged the building. Finally the police broke in and arrested 400 people inside...
...another railroad clash, in Germiston east of Johannesburg, police killed three more union demonstrators. The police said they were attacked by workers wielding knives and throwing stones; union leaders insisted the police had stormed into the crowd with whips...
...Rensburg, a railroad worker who helps in a soup kitchen that provides 300 meals a day for the Afrikaner poor: "I haven't made up my mind. I am not happy with any party or any policy in South Africa. I don't agree completely with anything that is being offered. I can't change overnight...