Word: roundup
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...back of his brown-and-tan Ford pickup are 1,042 lbs. of live rattlesnakes. Behind him sit ten more trucks, also filled with live rattlesnakes. The snakes, venomous Western diamondbacks, are reluctant participants in what has become a rite of spring in rural Texas: the rattlesnake roundup...
...problem to livestock and people," he says. On and off since January, he has scoured the countryside for their dens, catching them while they're "cold" -- hibernating, slow moving. Now he and the other hunters will sell them for $3 per lb. at Sweetwater's 30th Annual Rattlesnake Roundup. The town's Jaycees, who organize the roundup as a community fund raiser, claim that of some 40 in the country, theirs is the largest and oldest, drawing crowds of 8,000 a day. They expect to clear about $40,000 from the take at the door and the sale...
...snakes turned in before noon the first morning, a total of 11,709 lbs. for the whole roundup," says John Womble, a carpenter who has been weighing snakes for twelve years. Womble's thick red mustache droops languidly at the corners of his mouth, and he is wearing a red Jaycee vest with badges and pins, a black cowboy hat, boots, gloves and heavy brown nylon chaps. "They're brought in U-Hauls so they don't freeze. We don't buy dead snakes. They come loose in horse trailers where we've got to get in and / pick...
...three-day roundup is as much carnival as hunt. It begins with a parade down Sweetwater's Broadway (antique cars; the Girl Scouts Troop No. 114 float; the Sweetwater High band; Dr. Michael Dainer, the town ob-gyn, with his Clydesdale and buggy; the Nolan County sheriff's posse) and a beauty-queen contest in which 21 of the town's young women vie for a scholarship prize of $1,000 and the title Miss Snake Charmer...
...front war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided not to bother with a meeting on the subject and simply said yes in a phone call to his Secretary of War, adding the bland advice, "Be as reasonable as you can." Signed a week later, the order led to the roundup and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans for the duration of World War II, an action that Hawaii Senator Spark Matsunaga calls the "one great blot on the Constitution." Last week the nation moved a step closer to expunging that stain. The Senate voted to give an apology...