Word: tallness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Gibson grew up in Harlem, sharp enough to shoot pool with the local sharks and tall enough to play basketball with the boys. She was impossible to beat at paddle ball, a skill that evolved into her powerful game of tennis. She admitted no equals in the segregated leagues. And soon her talents were grudgingly admitted by the whites-only tournaments. But even while winning, she was denied rooms at hotels. One refused to book reservations for a luncheon in her honor. She claimed not to care, telling TIME in 1957, "I tried to feel responsibilities to Negroes, but that...
...have thought herself a winner. Her life meandered after she gave up amateur tennis in 1958. Her marriage failed. Her illness has all but robbed her of speech. All the blinds are lowered at her home. But through a gap, the doorbell brings a momentary glimpse of a tall figure in khakis, refusing reply and vanishing into darkness. A certain unintended wistfulness haunts the title of her autobiography, I Always Wanted to Be Somebody. She was. But in East Orange, there is a woman who lives in an apartment whom nobody sees. She used to be somebody...
...relentless. The rice paddies, which need at least a foot of water, have less than one or two inches. The corn, which should be as tall as I am at this time of year, is barely half my height. Prospects for both the rice and the corn harvests are bleak. Everything is parched, and with each rainless day, water is vanishing with cruel rapidity. One evening I was at a huge lake, the Sohung reservoir, in the country's breadbasket. To be accurate, I was at what was once a huge lake. It is 96% gone, simply evaporated into thin...
...Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) paces edgily on a deserted New York City subway platform. A brilliant scientist who has recently used genetic engineering to eradicate an epidemic, Susan is not smart enough to realize she's in a horror movie and ought to be wary of approaching a tall, hooded stranger to ask the time. The stranger turns and reveals its hideous face--ewwww, a killer cockroach! It enfolds Susan in its great wings and flies off into the subway's dank underworld...
...group of Army recruits relaxed last month in a grove of tall oaks at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., finishing their catered lunch of roast turkey, scalloped potatoes, green beans and apple pie, Captain Lee McQueen's cell phone rang. The call was from his commander, warning that a practice assault planned for the base's bayonet-combat course might have to be called off: the mercury was creeping into the 90s. McQueen's team of drill sergeants--those fabled hard-noses delegated to whip raw recruits into shape--went into action. They dutifully set up a "wet-bulb globe-temperature...