Word: shafted
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When the National Park Service began looking around for a sculptor to do a new figure for the top of the 97-ft. shaft of the Yorktown, Va. monument commemorating Washington's victory over Cornwallis, its eye fell on Norwegian-born Oskar Hansen, 61. Hansen was a monument-maker of some repute: he did the figures at Boulder Dam, a World War I memorial in Hinsdale, Ill., and a Columbus memorial in Rio de Janeiro. What was needed at Yorktown was a new statue of Liberty to replace the one decapitated by lightning...
...first all went well. Sculptor Hansen designed a classic Goddess of Liberty. It was duly approved by the Park Service, and Hansen went to work. But Hansen soon began to worry about the shaft on which his new statue was to be placed. Not only was it a Victorian monstrosity, he charged, it was also an unsafe base for his new Liberty. At the top of the shaft, he said, is a gunmetal core which had repeatedly attracted lightning...
...last week, the Park Service and Sculptor Hansen seemed at hopeless deadlock. Hansen charged that when he agreed in 1949 to design a new figure, install it and repair the shaft, he did not know the condition of the column. His new, 13-ft. granite statue, he says, will "last for 10,000 years," and he objects to putting it on a base "that has not lasted the life time of a frame bungalow." The Park Service replied that Government engineers have inspected the shaft, and with a little fixing, it will be perfectly safe. Besides, Congress only appropriated...
...license a perfume salesman to handle a million-dollar-a-month casino, because he'd be in trouble by the end of the first day and then it would be the public would get the shaft as he tried to make up his losses. We've learned that the oldtime gambler will run a cleaner place, give the public the best breaks and have fewer hoodlums hanging around, than the amateur...
...kinds of pumps, controls, heat-exchangers and safety devices. Rickover, then a captain, worked in a swarm of difficulties, opposed by many in the Navy. But he won his battle. On May 31, Commissioner Murray, with Rickover standing beside him, opened a valve at Arco, Idaho. A shaft began turning over, and the world's first practical nuclear power plant was in successful operation...