Word: skillful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Skill. But spooning has become a crude technique, with a relatively picayune payoff. The real returns (from $15 to $1,000) come in hitting the jackpot. When that happens in most Nevada gambling houses, only a few coins tumble down. A bell rings, the box lights up, and a sharp-eyed change girl arrives at the machine, sometimes with an assortment of mechanic types who check to see that there has been no ham-handed tampering. If the win looks legitimate, the change girl pays the big money...
Cheating the modern slots is therefore no job for the amateur. It requires professional skills: the crust of the con man, the deftness of the dip, the skill of the safecracker. The professional cheater will buy a machine ($400 and up), take it home to his workshop for devoted scientific study. Disassembling it, he will examine each reel, spring and screw. How best to make his entry? What tool will do the job? What part of the mechanism should be jimmied with what tool? Then comes careful experimentation until at last he discovers the machine's weak spot...
While Nikita Khrushchev talks, the other 202 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union do their best to go about their daily business, living and loving, bettering their lot, and sometimes-with the skill born of long practice-outwitting bureaucracy. Last week's progress notes from Moscow...
...first radio broadcasts brought a response of British courage and skill reminiscent of the blitz. More than 200 potholers poured in from nearby towns. A clerk who had been refused time off to help in the rescue quit his job. An R.A.F. mountain rescue unit arrived, followed by crack rescue groups from the National Coal Board and the submarine base at Gosport. Hospitals sent cylinders of oxygen. The rescue workers struggled through the mud and darkness, slithered into waist-high pools. Fifty volunteers were spaced out at intervals in the tunnel to make a hand chain for passing on ropes...
...compact and small foreign cars only two years ago now have their own pat answer. Says one high-ranking automan: "Give the Big Three a year or so in the economy market, and Romney will be flat against the wall." But such crapehangers underestimate Romney's passion and skill in battling against odds...