Word: took
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...diplomat to help Western Europe toward unity. For this job Truman picked David K. E. Bruce, chief of the Economic Cooperation Administration mission in France, a lawyer and Virginia gentleman farmer. Bruce learned economics managing Mellon interests (his first wife was Andy Mellon's only daughter, Ailsa), later took a postgraduate course as Assistant Secretary of Commerce. To succeed Bruce at EGA he picked lively, earnest Barry Bingham, 43, wartime naval officer, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal and son of the late Robert Worth Bingham, onetime ambassador to Great Britain...
Soft-voiced, hard-eyed men in Kentucky's "Bloody" Harlan County began saying Ambrose Metcalfe was a "candidate" (meaning, for the graveyard) almost as soon as he pinned on a policeman's badge in 1946. It took him just two years and eight months to get there. Last week, when his kinfolk took his bullet-riddled body up the dusty Poor Fork road and buried it in a little family cemetery, many a hillman thought Ambrose had actually outlived his life expectancy...
...eared, tobacco-chewing County Judge Willie Bob Howard set the stage for Metcalfe's brief career as a cop. The judge took drastic steps to enforce the law. The ancient Cawood clan, which dominated the county, was cool to his kind of law enforcement. Sheriff Jim Cawood couldn't seem to find many bootleggers, and most of those got off. County Attorney Bert Howard and Commonwealth Attorney Daniel Boone Smith were Cawood adherents. So was Circuit Judge Jim Forester: Judge Willie Bob's convictions were regularly reversed in Jim Forester's court...
Judge Willie Bob took a daring step: he organized a county police force to compete with the sheriff's office. Big, mean, 29-year-old Ambrose Metcalfe, who had served as a sergeant in an armored division during World War II, became its captain. He swaggered out to "throw the fear of God" into Harlan County...
...roamed the mining settlements of the hill country like a hunter; he raided bootleggers (often without benefit of a search warrant), impounded slot machines and took a brutal delight in pistol-whipping lawbreakers and cursing their wives and womenfolk. One day his automobile blew up as he stepped on the starter-somebody had inserted dynamite caps in the engine. Somehow Ambrose Metcalfe walked away unhurt.* Once a moonshiner blasted at him with a shotgun; he was only grazed...