Word: townes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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What the announcer was reporting from his eyewitness perch to intent listeners all over Alaska was not an impending natural disaster, but the Alaskan equivalent of the Irish Sweepstakes: the yearly pool on when the ice would break up in the Tanana River at the little town of Nenana, southwest of Fairbanks. This year hopefuls all over the 49th state and Canada's Yukon Territory (no tickets are sold to "outsiders") bought 170,000 tickets at $1 apiece for a chance to guess the exact day, hour and minute of the breakup. The exact minute is determined...
...workers got up a $600 pool, won by a man who guessed that the ice would break up at 11:30 a.m. on April 30, still a favorite date among pool guessers. Not since that first year, mourn citizens of Nenana, has anybody from the lottery's home town won a prize. But Nenana (pop. 350) runs the contest as a civic enterprise and rakes in some 40% of the total take every year without any help from luck. In the spring, just about every adult in town works for the lottery for a while, at an average...
Last week the ice started grinding downstream, setting off a siren that brought everybody in town to watch the ice batter at the pole. At 11:26 a.m., May 8, the clock stopped. Holders of the eleven winning tickets, worth $8,454.50 apiece, ranged from a Fairbanks truck driver who had been betting on the Nenana lottery for 30 years to an Anchorage oil-company employee who had been in Alaska less than a year...
...only three days before De Gaulle spoke in Bourges, one of the worst riots since the Algerian war began broke out in Constantine, Algeria's third largest city. Enraged by a rebel attack outside town on two young Europeans and their teenage dates-one girl was kidnaped, the other three youngsters murdered-a mob of settlers surged through Constantine's streets wrecking Moslem shops, beating up such hapless Moslem citizens as fell into their hands, and shouting: "De Gaulle to the gallows!" Next day Moslem youths counterattacked in the streets, wielding knives, razors and steel-tipped clubs against...
Blitz Blessing. By actual clocking, the average speed possible for motorists to get across town ranges from 6 m.p.h. in Glasgow to 10 m.p.h. in London. At Worcester, where a dozen main roads converge on a single narrow bridge, lines of cars and trucks stretch as far as the eye can see. The Queensferry bridge over the River Dee-on the main route from the north in Wales-is barely wide enough for two lines of vehicles, and five-mile traffic jams are normal. The last piece of major road construction in London was built 50 years ago. A brand...