Word: townsfolk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Seventeenth century students were not satisfied with setting fires but soon took to fighting them. They organized a volunteer fire department and raced through town on joy rides whether or not there was a fire and whether or not the townsfolk wanted them to extinguish it. The students were justified in their stimulation, though: restrictions that held them in the Yard were lifted whenever the word "Fire!" was heard. One historian claims that the young men also looked forward after fire-fighting to relieving their parched throats with firewater at the local...
Then-the unthinkable. The townsfolk of Carvel turn on Andrew Hardy and circulate a petition to rezone the land to "keep Carvel just as it is." Despondent, sure to lose his job, Andy chokes up a sopping little farewell speech before a packed crowd at the city council meeting, then slopes off round-shouldered to pack his bags. Rooney fans who have to ask what happens next should be charged double admission. When it's over, instead of flashing the usual THE END on the screen, the film's producers own up to the obvious: TO BE CONTINUED...
...salesman from Gary, Ind., who bursts into staid River City, charms a frozen-faced populace into digging into their cookie jars and mattresses to buy instruments and uniforms for a boys' marching band that will be led by Professor Hill himself. The show winds up with an enlivened townsfolk who know the score, and a mildly reformed Pied Piper who has scored with the pretty librarian...
Verdi was born of peasant stock near the town of Busseto in the Po Valley in 1813. When he was 18, the townsfolk sent him to Milan Conservatory, hoping that he could be trained to become Bus-seto's organist and orchestra director. But the conservatory examiners flunked Verdi; his talent for composition, they said, was "passable," but his pianoforte technique was ruined by "a faulty position of the hands and wrists." This "blow to all his pride and hope was so terrible" that Verdi never forgot, never forgave it. Helped by a friendly patron, he buckled down...
...experts worked with a scintillation counter over every square foot of the grounds. The counter registered 60 times the normal (background) radioactivity. Technicians, looking like spacemen in white rubber suits with protective masks and gloves, used long-handled shovels to put radioactive matter away in a special truck. Frightened townsfolk washed their hair as often as Mary Martin in South Pacific, and many trooped in to the local police station to have their radioactivity tested. All this furor was touched off by a little Putten girl's stuffy nose...