Word: shaft
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Near Pikes Peak was a creek with banks so steep that cattlemen named it Cripple Creek. The place was poor for grazing, but some Colorado promoters in 1884 thought it looked like a fine spot for a quick killing. As the story goes, they dug a shaft and fired shotgun charges of gold dust into the sides, spread the word of their "strike," and cleaned up on the dupes who rushed in to buy claims...
...Ambassador is elderly (73), stout (200 Ibs. on a 5 ft. 10½ in. frame), genial-jowled, courtly and oracular in an oldtime way. He is no shaft of lightning in extempore debate. He can bumble well-meaningly as he did during the 1948 Israel crisis, when he urged disputatious Arabs and Jews to get together and "settle this problem in a true Christian spirit." He cannot match India's Sir Benegal Rau in subtlety and sophistication. Britain's Sir Gladwyn Jebb is his superior in verbal riposte. But Austin sallies into U.N.'s polemic fray with...
...hours shivering miners' wives, their scarves tightly knotted beneath blue pinched faces, stood round the pithead in stunned misery, while Salvation Army officers served tea and prayed, and squeaking shaft wheels lowered rescue teams into the smoke-choked mine. Meanwhile, grim-faced union and government officials sat in conference. At midday they issued a statement...
...Shaft wheels halted, children stood silently in empty coal trucks and villagers tensely closed in on a pit official as he read aloud from a pink slip of paper: "There is no possibility of any of the men remaining in the district affected being alive . . . It was then unanimously decided that no course remained except to seal off the affected part of the pit. This work is now taking place...
Some women fainted, others knelt in prayer. The shaft wheels turned again, this time lowering sand bags to seal off the area where the 80 men had died...