Word: thickness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...take advantage of Ecuador's rich soil, it brought the boom. As the dread Panama disease, a killing blight, ravaged older banana plantations through Central America, Galo Plaza spent every dollar his government could spare to open up the virgin coastal plain, where rich topsoil lay three feet thick. In ten years Ecuador built 1,600 miles of road. United Fruit opened a 7,000-acre plantation. Poor settlers from the highlands joined in and got 124 acres of government land free. Now Ecuador is the world's biggest banana exporter, with shipments of $70 million last year...
...Dust was thick on the Kenya plains as touring Queen Mother Elizabeth beamed down at Narok on rows of proud, bellicose Masai warriors, resplendent in lion-skin headdresses. Touching briefly on a local morale problem, Her Majesty expressed the hope that rain would soon fall in Kenya, which had suffered a four-month drought. Hardly had she finished speaking when the rains came-so heavy that roads turned to sludge, and the Queen's car barely made it to the airstrip for her flight to Mombasa. But the Masai, water cascading off their lion skins, trudged happily homewards, more...
Legendary Grandfather. In 1815 Europeans began penetrating the thick forests of Guinea, which was to give its name to a coin of purest gold, a kind of grass, and a species of hen. Among them was a young Frenchman named René Caillé, who, dressed as an Arab, talked of his captivity by the Egyptians, was accepted as a Moslem and was able to make his famed journey safely to Timbuktu. After him other Frenchmen came, and eventually, by the "rules of the game,"*laid down by the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 for spreading civilization throughout darkest Africa...
Over Conakry, a city of sleepy charm with its thick-walled, whitewashed houses, its cool green mango trees, its shops and bars that bear the stamp of France (Le Royal St. Germain, A la Chope Bar, Chez Maitre Diop), an air of harassed improvisation fell. For lack of help, ministers had to do the secretarial work while visitors clogged their waiting rooms. Telephones did not work, clerks scuttered about looking for the only copy of the diplomatic list. Messages were sent in to the Minister of Health while he was performing surgical operations...
...smokeless, nonflammable paint said by its makers to be far more effective than other fire-retarding paints was brought out by Baltimore Paint & Chemical Corp. Called Saf, it stops flames from spreading, insulates interiors against heat by forming a coat of cellular puffs up to an inch thick when touched by fire. Cost...