Word: squatness
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...lights blinked out in the Centralia Coal Company's Mine No. 5, near Centralia, Ill. Wiry, redheaded Earl Wilkinson had just coasted his squat, electric locomotive out of a tunnel, banged to a stop in a low cavern near the mine's elevator shaft. He stiffened, listened intently. He heard no sound. But a wind came out of the subterranean darkness and enveloped him in clouds of coal dust and coppery-smelling smoke. "God," he said aloud, "it's a bad windy* or an explosion...
...crowded place, with 7,000 enrolled-2,000 more than in prewar days. The old college suite of bedroom and sitting room, with a servant for every "staircase," has given way to the shared austerity of a frequently servantless "bed-sitting-room." Nissen huts (British version of Quonset huts) squat in the quads; the students roam far & wide in search of "diggings" (off-campus rooms) in increasingly industrial Oxford town...
Some of the reasons: New York public schools are overcrowded (in one last fall, children had to squat on tin pails and fruit baskets for lack of chairs, and every day, because of the teacher shortage, hundreds of classes go "uncovered." i.e., teacherless). Many schools are shy of up-to-date textbooks. A $38,000,000 building program is still largely in the blueprint stage, and schoolhouses are dangerously decrepit (said Mayor William O'Dwyer: "Those old Civil War firetraps are ghastly"). Above all, parents don't want their boys & girls to pick up the "dese-&-dose" accent...
...Facing his staff the first day on the job, he looked at his watch, announced that, from that moment, the common scold of Champa Street "ain't mad at nobody." By last week, having cleaned house on Champa Street, he got set to move the Post from its squat, gaudy old building. The Post bought the Home Public Market and an adjoining five-story office building, ordered 24 new high-speed presses. Hoyt announced his goal: to make the Post "the best newspaper published any place by anybody in the whole world...
...William, who has modeled the King and Queen, Queen Mary, Churchill and Halifax without raising anybody's hackles, implied that it was all a matter of artistic license, good-naturedly explained that "a sitting figure of Roosevelt would be all wrong in the general arrangement. It would look squat and dumpy alongside the tall trees that will surround...