Word: shale
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Shale & Possums. Trouble came soon and often. As the 249 competing cars (including 30 different makes) streamed out of Sydney toward Brisbane early this month, small boys stoned them from the roadside. Drivers got lost when wise guys switched highway markers around. A New Zealand entrant burned his hands beating out an engine fire, and 20 cars bogged down in mud. By the time the pack passed the first check point, drivers and officials were already wrangling over penalties...
North past Rockhampton, the cars churned up clouds of dust and ran down dozens of blinded kangaroos and possums. From tropical Townsville west to Mount Isa, on one of the worst stretches of road in Australia, they wallowed in talcum-fine sand or crunched across sharp shale that ripped tires to ribbons. Rocks tore into gas tanks and crumpled fenders. Two cars turned over. A Ford Zephyr plowed into a cow, tossed the animal into the air and caught it on the motor hood. Zephyr and cow were flattened beyond repair...
...because the company's motto is "We take on anything") is headed by Clint Murchison Jr., 30-year-old son of the multimillionaire Texas wheeler-dealer (TIME, May 24). Eager for the worldwide attention that the job will create, up-and-coming Tecon agreed to move soft shale from the hill at $1.06 a cu. yd., rock at $1.46, and to finish the job in 15 months. Nobody knew exactly how much shale and how much rock would have to be removed to make the canal safe, but official estimates ran as high as a total...
...fissures, a foot or two in width, now trace an irregular line back of and parallel to the canal-fronting face of Contractor's Hill. Engineers guess that the cracks may run 600 ft. deep. Because it is hard, granite-like rock rather than the soft, clay-shale conglomerate of earlier slides, the face of Contractor's Hill will make a formidable dam if it falls...
...special complication : South Africa and the drab gold-mining town from which she comes. The pains of adolescence are intensified by "the slow corrosive guilt...which, admitted or denied, is in all white South Africans," and by the fact that while the mine yields gold, the town offers only shale. Groping toward maturity, Helen Shaw supplies her own clinical study of her troubles in the first person singular...