Word: roughnecking
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Mark Twain had once described a legendary Mississippi River roustabout, Mike Fink, as "half man, half alligator," the Vagabond remembered. That certainly caught his character right,--a leathery-hides roughneck, quick with a knife, ready to let you have it with hands, feet, fingernails, anti teeth if he didn't like the way you shook your dice...
Winthrop Rockefeller, 28, grandson of the late John D., is big (6 ft. 2 in.), husky (215 lb.), moonfaced, affable. Like many a less wealthy American, he started college (Yale), but did not finish. He worked as a roughneck in Texas oil fields, then got an office job with Socony-Vacuum Oil Co. In the draft lottery he drew an order number in the safe 6,000s. He liked his job all right, but, like many another young man of high & low degree, he volunteered...
...rose from pushing over Elwood outhouses (sometimes with outraged citizens in them), on through college, when he was so pugnaciously nonconformist as to organize the "barbs" against the fraternity men. He had always eventually conformed, but always on his own terms. In his last year as a turtleneck-sweatered roughneck at Indiana University he did join a fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, best on the campus, whose requirements were: a slick blond pompadour and more money than brains. Willkie had neither...
Nobody was more surprised than MGM officials to wake up one night to find that Love Finds Andy Hardy was being enthusiastically received in all the best movie houses. Here was MGM with a serial gold mine on its hands and a surprising new star, an appealing Irish roughneck who had twined his boyish fingers around the heart strings of U. S. movie goers...
...most dramatic portrait is that of Olympias, wife of lusty, roughneck Philip II, mother of psychopathic Alexander the Great. Her sinister and violent career has always given historians the creeps. But no historian has shown so shrewd an insight into her character as Laura Riding. She poses a daring speculation: Was Olympias perhaps a noble woman embittered and corrupted by her coarsely disappointing husband? Likewise the career of Cleopatra becomes a seductive peg on which to hang the thesis that women are pretty much what men make them...