Word: toothpick
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Passing of the Toothpick...
Race Referee Clifford ("Tip") Goes shouted: "Ready all, row!" and 88 lean crewmen bent to it, pulling their lightweight (250 lbs.) toothpick shells in surging spurts over Syracuse's Lake Onondaga. It was the golden jubilee race of the Intercollegiate Rowing Association, once known as the Poughkeepsie Regatta, later shifted from the Hudson River to the Ohio (at Marietta), and now settled at Syracuse, out of reach of floods...
Harvard's first head, the controversial Master Nathaniel Eaton, flogged disobedient undergraduates, and in 1639 he clobbered a faculty assistant with a "walnut tree cudgel," compared to which the modern billy club would be a toothpick...
...catalogue has been known on farms for half a century as the Wishbook, or the farmer's best friend. A scrapbook of America, it has mirrored the country's changing manners and habits. In the early days, Sears' ultimate in sophistication was a solid gold toothpick with earspoon combined, its recommendation for an evening's entertainment a stereoscope with "twelve splendid views portraying in the most vivid manner the story of our Savior's life before & after Crucifixion." Sickly Sears customers were urged to wear a "Heidelberg Electric Belt" for nervous diseases, headaches or backaches...
Thin, sad Burglar René Girier was a slippery one, no doubt about it. Because of his attenuated form they called him René the Stick, and truly it sometimes seemed as though René could slip through holes that would stop a toothpick. In 1942 the Vichy police had picked him up for robbing a farm, and René had skipped across the border into occupied France. The Germans picked him up there and sent him to a labor camp in Berlin. Two weeks later he had escaped again and was back in Paris...