Word: scratch
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...rough-cut plank cabin near Greasy Creek, so far back in the Ozarks of northwest Arkansas that the first paved road to the outside world was not completed 'until 1949. when Orval Faubus was a state highway commissioner. He trapped skunk and muskrat to help his family scratch out a living from their hill farm, and trudged five miles a day to a one-room country school. Eager for book learning, he finally managed to graduate from Huntsville High School when he was 24, three years after he married plain, amiable Alta Haskins. In 1935 he enrolled...
...Scratch One. In Philadelphia, after Detective Edward Pushkarwicz got poison ivy investigating a cash and stamp theft from a small post office, he arrested a suspect at home on finding a bottle of poison ivy lotion in the bedroom...
...second of three sons of Ohio schoolteachers, McElroy was born in Berea (pop. 15,000), grew up in a strict but comfortable Methodist household in Madisonville, a suburb of Cincinnati, early learned that "God will provide if you go out and scratch." By shoveling snow, wrapping laundry bundles, working in a cannery, he had saved $1,000 by the time he finished high school. A scholarship from Cincinnati's Harvard Club stretched the $1,000, allowed him to work part-time, have enough time left to become a big man on the Harvard campus-varsity basketball center, president...
Rural Development is one of the few farm programs that really work. Yet it gets a cold reception from politicians because it is prompted by an unpleasant fact that they prefer to ignore. The fact: too many farmers are trying to scratch out a living on farms that are too small to be profitable. From 1930 to 1954, the average U.S. farm jumped from 157 to 242 acres. But with the cost of mechanization, even that is not enough to support a single family in many areas. And in hundreds of scrubby farming counties, the cultivated area per farm averages...
...rush out into her garden like a starved animal. On visiting someone else's garden, she often "separated the sepals of flowers . . . smelled them . . . crumpled the leaves, chewed them, licked the poisonous berries and the deadly mushrooms . . . attracted bees and wasps, letting them alight on her hands and scratching their backs. 'They like that,' " she said. "Like a bacchante after libations," she would stumble along, "nose and . . . forehead covered with yellow pollen, her hair in disorder and full of twigs, a bump here and a scratch there...