Word: shakedowns
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...modern battleship of basic U.S. design; the first major warship built on the West Coast (San Francisco's Union Iron Works, 1896). But her great claim to fame was that for 68 days the U.S. waited with bated breath while she raced against time: she had completed her shakedown cruise in the Pacific in time to start a 14,700-mile dash to the Atlantic to fight the Spanish Fleet. She almost foundered in the storm-racked Magellan Strait. She had no time to have her boiler cleaned, her bottom scraped. And she arrived off the Cuban coast just...
...Long Island, a trim new plane raced down the runway, lifted, climbed up, up, up almost beyond hearing, then peeled off into a grinding power-dive. Fresh off the assembly line, another Grumman Avenger, the Navy's new, deadly torpedo plane, was in the torturing rigors of its shakedown flight...
...torpedoed 400 miles out of Brest by U-boat Commander Hans Rose, who hit her at 3,000 yards, the longest successful torpedo shot on record. The Navy, which does not believe in ill omens, will no doubt soon launch a sleek, new Jacob Jones III, and before the shakedown cruise is over the crew will call her "Jakie...
...first shakedown stage of U.S. censorship brought up a few baffling cases of censorship in action. Most striking example: Columnists Pearson and Allen (Washington Merry-Go-Round) were called on the carpet by a White House spokesman, and told to withdraw an about-to-be-published column criticizing Navy's competence at Pearl Harbor. They were told that if they did not change their editorial attitude they would be barred from all official news sources-a penalty which would virtually put any Washington newspaperman out of business. On the surface the action looked like an attempt to suppress criticism...
...Government, which accused Willie and his friend George E. Browne of racketeering, a group of moviemen told of paying $887,700 to the two bosses of the A.F. of L. stagehands' union-under threat of strikes if they resisted the shakedown. Then Willie Bioff took the stand to give his own version of his success story. He blandly raised the total that moviemen had given him to more than $1,000,000. But he denied completely that it was extortion money. His story...