Word: smelts
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Lazily rocking on his back porch Saturday noon, the star boarder of the Poon thought he smelt a seersucker burning. After a quick huddle and a fruitless search for their insurance policy, the amateur fire-sniffers voted 23 to 2 to let the place burn down. Someone, however, had already asked the local hose-and-axemen to "send a man over." He came, but he brought his friends: three engine companies, two hook-and-ladder trucks and one rescue squad. No smoke, no fire, obviously a false alarm. Whether or not the whole thing was a stunt to increase sales...
Last year's spring catch was zero. Last week, in streams around Michigan's Green Bay and Huron's Saginaw Bay, with smelts making belated spawning runs, men, women & children dipped up hundreds with their nets. Dr. John Van Oosten of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in charge of investigating the smelt situation, estimated that the normal Great Lakes smelt population (1942 catch: 5,000,000 lb. ) would be restored in four years...
...incredible Great Lakes smelt situation was so described last week by Dr. John Van Oosten of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The vast smelt population of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron (where some 95% of U.S. fresh water smelts lived) had suddenly vanished. Two years ago fishermen took 5,000,000 Ib. of smelts there; last year, 1,000,000. Total catch this winter: 2 Ib. No one knew why the smelts had died...
...Green Bay, off northern Michigan, where smelts grew thickest, fishermen caught them through holes in the ice in winter, dipped them out of streams with nets when they swam upstream to spawn in spring. A terrific breeder (the female casts more than 20,000 eggs), the smelt fed on insect larvae, other fish and sometimes its own young. Green Bay fishermen began to notice something wrong last winter, when dead smelts popped up through their fishing holes in the ice. By spring great shoals of dead fish were being washed ashore and the lake bottoms were carpeted with them...
...bicycles - runty, bowlegged little men in cheap, stained uniforms, half of them wearing spectacles, only one out of every 25 armed with a machine gun, the rest carrying .25-caliber rifles. They were drenched in old sweat - "you could smell a troop of Japs 100 feet away . . . they smelt like hell...