Word: steamboats
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...halo run amok. He speaks, and the words emerge in a soft, sepulchral baritone. They undulate in measured phrases, expire in breathless wisps. He fills his lungs and blows word-rings like smoke. The sentences curl upward. They chase each other around the room in dreamy images of Steamboat Gothic. Now he conjures moods of mirth, now of sorrow. He rolls his bright blue eyes heavenward. In funereal tones, he paraphrases the Bible (" 'Lord, they would stone me . . .'") and church bells peal. "Motherhood." he whispers, and grown men weep. "The Flag!" he bugles, and everybody salutes...
...strongly influenced John Constable and Washington Allston, and he might have made something special "in the painting way" out of Robert Fulton and Samuel F. B. Morse had not the impulse to invent the steamboat and the telegraph taken priority with them. When he died in 1820, a few weeks after George III, the new King, George IV, wanted to banish all his father's Wests to the lumber room of Windsor Castle. He backed down only when another eminent West student intervened. The man was Sir Thomas Lawrence, who in that same year started his own loving portrait...
...America's gambling fever has never been confined to games of chance. After the 1794 yellow fever epidemic, bets were made on the number of the dead. Bettors so pressured steamboat captains to race one another that passengers bribed, pleaded and fought for berths farthest away from the boilers. "Bet-a-Million" Gates, who would bet on anything, used to moisten a lump of sugar and bet $1,000 a fly on how many flies would alight on it. In 1944, General Eisenhower bet ?5 that his troops would reach the German border by Christmas-but lost. Al Capone...
...Steamboat Springs, Colo...
...when Colonel Mobutu's troops finally got their hands on the fleeing Lumumba, he already was beyond remote Port Francqui, a steamboat stop on the Kasai River, 400 miles from Leopoldville. As angry crowds surrounded the Port Francqui police station shouting "Judas" and "Traitor," the soldiers wired their army boss to collect Lumumba immediately, or they would shoot him for treason. Sternly, Mobutu sent back word not to harm the prisoner and dispatched a plane to pick him up. "I cannot judge him. He must defend himself before the courts," explained Mobutu...