Word: railways
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Nkomo has actively pursued majority rule in Rhodesia for a quarter-century. A former union leader (he has been a carpenter and a railway worker), he spent eleven years in various forms of detention. He was a founding member in 1952 of the once significant African National Congress and became its president; when it was banned in 1959, he resurfaced as founder of the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), which soon became the focus of activism for Rhodesia's black liberationists. Nkomo has been the primary spokesman for Rhodesia's blacks, traveling often to Britain...
...behind this façade of luxury and speed lurks a grim reality. Like many of the railroads of the world, the Japanese National Railway is on the brink of bankruptcy. Last week the line was barely saved from defaulting on $138 million in debts to 10,000 private companies when it canceled maintenance and construction contracts and received a $138 million stopgap loan from the Finance Ministry. Even so, more huge debts fall due next month, and the government is in no mood for another rescue. The Finance Ministry and private banks, which in the past have generously bailed...
...money at a rate that makes the old Penn Central's losses trivial by comparison. One example: the Biko line, which serves a sparsely populated area on the island of Hokkaido, has outlays of $11 for every 34? it earns. In the past twelve years, the Japanese National Railway has piled up a staggering debt of $34 billion; at present it is losing money at the rate of $8.6 million...
Cleaning Coops. If Perdue looks believable as a man devoted to raising tender chickens, it is no accident. His father Arthur, now 91, quit his job as a Railway Express agent and in 1920 set up a chicken house on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Frank, an only child, grew up with the birds: "I dug cesspools, made coops and cleaned them out." By the mid 1950s, the Perdues' well-bred chickens were winning top prices at auctions, but Frank realized that there was money to be made processing and marketing the birds as well. Eight years...
...scrambler with strong currents of cockney in his speech, started out in the mail room of a London ad agency and within seven years was the head of his own flourishing production company. His specialty was commercials that recalled old movies. One showed a freshly forlorn figure at a railway station, trudging through clouds of locomotive steam, accompanied by the Rachmaninoff theme from Brief Encounter and making his melancholy way home to break open a Birds Eye Frozen Dinner for One. Parker made over 600 commercials in less than six years, hankering all the while to do something more expansive...