Word: talbot
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Near Aurora, Ill. L. W. Talbot, driving a truckload of piglets to the Chicago stockyards, had to stop when the road was blanketed by a cloud of smoke from peat fires. Behind him came another truckload of pigs driven by Ellis Johnson, who drove into the smoke, smashed into the rear of Talbot's truck. Behind Johnson came a string of five automobiles. One by one they disappeared in the smoke cloud, each ramming the car ahead. Eighth in line was Elmer Reiser who, suspecting a holdup, swung into the left lane and sped ahead. He smashed into...
Excited book-boomers have compared this unusual biography to James Boswell's Life of Johnson, to Herman Melvill's Moby Dick, to Charles Montagu Doughty's Arabia Deserta. The Book of Talbot is a biography of a comparatively unknown man written by his widow. Gravely, not to say solemnly told, it is sometimes pompous but never inane. Authoress Clifton's fierce reverence for her subject does at times succeed in making her manner grand...
Like many an Englishman since the days of Drake, Talbot Clifton (1868-1928), found England too small, too safe. Scion of an ancient line (beginning in 1060), and inheritor of great estates, he stayed caged only long enough to go through Eton and Cambridge, then set off to live dangerously in far places. Twice before he was 20 he circled the globe, but trotting in tourist tracks was not his idea. He aimed to make his body an instrument of his will. Practicing this counsel of perfection, he wandered purposefully to Mexico, California, Alaska, the Barren Lands north of Hudson...
...turned his stomach. Once in Africa, stooping to drink from a shallow well, he saw in the water beneath his own reflection "the ragged black face of a man, newly murdered." But he was thirsty and drank "gratefully." Just returned to England at the outbreak of the Boer War, Talbot went back again as war correspondent. A slow-healing love affair drove him to Siberia, where he shot an ovis nivicula (mountain sheep), and a new species later named in his honor ovis cliftoni. He was stabbed by a drunken Cossack servant, rested a while at Verkhoyansk, coldest spot...
...Talbot met his wife in PerUj where she was living with her father, the British Minister. It was love at third sight; they went back to England, properly chaperoned, to get married. Rawboned Violet was no less characterful than Talbot, and even on this first trip they had stormy times. But she never tried to domesticate him. Soon after marriage they went off to Burma and the Malay Archipelago to find new types of orchid. When the Great War came, Talbot, too old for active service, got a coast guard job cruising off Ireland; they bought a house and settled...