Word: sierras
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...friends in Bakersfield, Calif. decided to hunt for uranium, they did it the easy way. They bought a $495 scintillator and drove along the country roads in Kern County around Bakersfield. One day last December, as they drove along the Walker Pass road through the southern Sierra Mountains, the needle of the scintillator began to "go crazy." Bartlett and his friends began to "go scrambled out, soon found the reason: a big granite outcropping studded with pockets of radioactive ore (autunite). When they tunneled into the mountainside, the Sunday prospectors found enough ore to give California its first solid uranium...
...first vacation as Secretary, after the hard-driving Alaskan swing, McKay went on a hard-riding packhorse trip in California's Yosemite National Park (part of Interior's domain). For five days McKay, wearing a comfortable cowboy outfit, roughed it frontier-style-riding the steep Sierra trail, cooking in the open, camping out at night. This week, at his summer house on the Oregon coast, he relaxed with his family (13 in all, with Mabel McKay cooking...
...last, desperate days of his government, President Jacobo Arbenz summoned Finance Minister Raúl Sierra Franco to the presidential offices and told him: "I must have 2,000,000 quetzales* right away; a friendly government has agreed to sell us fighter planes for cash." Sierra Franco, a dutiful and upright functionary, replied that there was probably only a million in cash available, but offered to get that...
...director of the government-run Agrarian Bank, who in turn filled out two checks for 500.000 quetzales each to Alfonso Martínez (boss of the agrarian-reform program) and Colonel Carlos Enrique Díaz (head of the armed forces). They gave the checks back to Sierra Franco, who cashed them for blue 20-quetzal bills and grey 100-quetzal bills. He took the million, stuffed in a big canvas bag, back to Arbenz' office and turned it over to the President, Mart...
...days later Arbenz got Sierra Franco to produce another 100,000 quetzales "for emergency purposes," but the President fled to Mexican embassy asylum before he could take possession. That was when Sierra Franco found that he had been made the dupe. Hiding the 100,000 quetzales in his home, he too took refuge. Last week, on his phoned instructions, his wife gave the bills back to the treasury...