Word: tractor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Goodrum is hunched over the wheel of a Freightliner, straining with all her 106-lb. might to maneuver 61 ft. of tractor-trailer into a parking space that doesn't look large enough for two Corvettes. Like most novice truck drivers, she is confronted by too many tasks demanding simultaneous attention: eyeballing six side-view mirrors, working a gargantuan steering wheel and a muscle-wearying clutch pedal, and monitoring an instrument panel befitting a 727. Goodrum eases the rig back until . . . kerplunk, she mashes into a barricade of tires...
That learning has already come for Richard Coombes, a lanky Missourian. Despite much self-doubt, Coombes has made it through the school with a 91.4 average. As instructors pump his hand, the ex-store clerk clutches a diploma in tractor-trailer driving and grins broadly. "I kept telling myself, 'You can do it. You can do it.' " He sallies into the Texas night, now a king of the road with a new measure of self-esteem: "I can't think of anything that hasn't been hauled in a truck," he says...
...Gorbachev family probably avoided the worst of the suffering: it was on the winning side. Mikhail's grandfather Andrei helped organize the Khleborob (bread producer) collective farm in the year of Gorbachev's birth. Andrei's son Sergei drove a combine for a nearby government machine-tractor station. $ But Mikhail could hardly have helped hearing tales of the disruption that continued during his infancy. As General Secretary, Gorbachev has defended the collectivization and even the repression of the kulaks (well-off peasants), who were deported or executed as class enemies. But perhaps because of boyhood memories, he has criticized...
...says Hunter in a lilting twang punctuated by the occasional dadgummit. "The farm isn't groomed -- there's a kind of wildness to the place. It's beautiful, a little Nirvana down there." Holly was the willful tomboy. "My father did not approve of my learning to drive a tractor," she says, "which is probably why I'm so stubborn. He made the rules, and I broke them. But, like everyone who grows up on a farm, I got a working knowledge of life and death and what goes on in between. Cats get bitten by snakes, dogs...
...fact, the question of what constitutes a truly American icon has become befuddling. A Sohio gasoline station? British Petroleum owns that company now. An Allis-Chalmers farm tractor? The West Germans manufacture those. Ball Park franks are owned by a British conglomerate; so is French's mustard. The take from Las Vegas' Dunes Hotel and Country Club, one of the best-known American gambling and entertainment centers, will soon go to its new Japanese owner. The latest hit recording by Country Singer Kenny Rogers is a foreign-owned product; his record label, RCA, is now West German property. And what...