Word: stoker
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Gothenburg, Sweden in 1897, emigrated to the U.S. in 1910. Completing grammar school in Holyoke, Mass., Bannow went to work as an apprentice patternmaker in 1911 at 6½? an hour ("I was grossly underpaid"). In 1919 he shipped around the world for a year as a coal stoker on a freighter ("I had to get that phase out of my system"). At 30, he bought Bridgeport Pattern and Model Works with "$80 and a $3,000 loan,'1 changed its name to Bridgeport Machines, Inc., and went to work manufacturing milling machines. The company now has 400 profit...
...syndicated name-droppings, Miller teetotals through the nightspots until 4 a.m. On dull nights he prowls for crime stories, Winchell-fashion, in a black 1957 Chrysler equipped with three short-wave radios. By 5 a.m. he goes home for supper with his wife, a onetime singer named Cindy Stoker, sleeps for an average of four hours, then bangs out one of his columns...
...whose Eskimo-life reporting is considered first-rate popularized anthropology; of a heart attack; at Elmendorf Air Base, near Fairbanks, Alaska. Irascible, impetuous, cantankerous, big (6 ft. 4 in.) Peter Freuchen, descendant of a Danish-Jewish seafaring family, quit medical school for a job at sea, sailed as a stoker, got his first glimpse of Greenland at 20. He returned thereafter with various expeditions, soon learned to talk, live, love like an Eskimo. In 1912 Freuchen and his friend Knud Rasmussen crossed the north Greenland icecap. Childlike in his daring, steel-girded in his endurance, he once (1923) hammered...
...their Norwegian airfields. The crew is fed nothing but fear, lethal cold, and the slower death of the corned-beef sandwich. On this unhappy ship all is misery; she becomes a debating society, with the crew arguing their orders and the time and manner of their death. From stoker to captain, everyone is infected with what the British call "the Nelson touch," i.e., an inspired disregard for orders. There is heroism, and men die well in these brutal waters, but the admiral cracks up and wanders crazed in his pajamas...
...young (35) Californian named Ray Bradbury is regarded as the arrived monster-monger, fit replacement for August Derleth, eldritch statesman of the well-informed witchlover. Author Bradbury may owe even more to John Collier, another veteran djinn-and-bitters addict. Like Mary Wollstonecraft (Frankenstein) Shelley and Bram (Dracula) Stoker, these writers appeal to the middle or relatively uncorrugated brow, rather than the highbrow, who finds more than enough to bite his nails over in the Age of Anxiety without faking up a little more. The highbrow, in fact, whose modern poetic world has been defined by Poet Marianne Moore...