Word: seams
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Good reporting is seldom easy or comfortable. But for correspondent Ted Gup, getting to the bottom of this week's BUSINESS story about life and hard times in a West Virginia coal community was especially unsettling. "The first time I entered a low-seam coal mine was one of the most claustrophobic experiences of my life," says Gup. "You lie on your back on a metal sled, and the distance between the floor and ceiling is never greater than 40 inches. You're in utter darkness -- except for the light on your hard hat. You eat your lunch on your...
Pete Spradlin was four when his father was killed in a local mine at 27. Pete was taken in by his grandfather, whose skull was crushed in a cave-in when Pete was 13. Now, at 44, Spradlin works the same rolling seam of coal -- Chilton, it is called -- that his father and grandfather did. Each morning Spradlin enters the Bantam Mine, crouching to clear the sign that reads WORK SAFE AND ENJOY LIFE. But Spradlin has had his own close calls -- a gashed lip that took 16 stitches, a couple of cracked ribs, a broken finger, two teeth knocked...
...mine to a conveyor belt. The monotony of the job is numbing. "It's like a yo-yo, all day, back and forth, all day," he says. Sometimes he is two miles within the mountain. Often he kneels in mud and water. He has worked in low- seam coal, a claustrophobic 29 inches from the mine floor to the roof. To eat his dinner, he has had to lie on his back. To relieve himself, he squats in one of the myriad byways. When the day is done, coal dust covers his face and permeates his overalls. Ruby takes...
...songs reinforce the upbeat message. "Standin' tall on the wings of my dream," goes the ditty for Perfect Strangers, while Going Places celebrates the "wide open spaces for my dreams," and Family Matters opens jauntily: "All I see is a tower of dreams/ Real love bursting out of every seam...
...living in France in the early 1950s; their rapport lasted 10 years, and the young English art critic kept ample notes. With the assistance of art historian Marilyn McCully (whose speciality is turn-of-the-century Barcelona, where Picasso's talent was incubated), Richardson has mined a large seam of material. He was, for instance, the first biographer allowed to consult Picasso's own archives. He knows the work intimately, and is skilled at teasing out its recurrent strands of imagery -- those pointers to Picasso's deepest impulses -- across a long span of time...