Word: truck
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...secret. "Look, when you're doing factory work and you're a kid--now this was cannery work, mind you, and they wouldn't allow no radios in the plant--you go a little bug-eyed. Come lunch, though, and we all used to go out in the truck where we could pick up the one station from Charlotte that played rock and roll. I'll tell you it saved our skins. It got us through till beer time." He winks. "And after that, well, after that we would get pretty wild...
Elvis Presley came out of the South, came out, as a truck driver once told me, "singing the pants off songs," but still, he came out of the South. If the furthest south you tend to get is D.C., then Elvis might not make a lot of sense, except as some sort of defiant yahoo, some blazing anachronism. After all, by the time most of us got to him, he looked pretty silly in those white jump suits with the high collars, and that plasticene pompadour. He was singing in Vegas then--our most improbable city--or out in Honolulu...
...Manhattan. He is a street vendor, one of about 7,500 who pay New York City $25 a year for a license to sell their wares on the sidewalk. No one knows how many more ply the same trade illegally, or how much of their merchandise "fell off a truck," i.e., was stolen. But marketplaces are in plain view nearly everywhere. Weather permitting, and especially on fine spring days, certain blocks in midtown and the Wall Street area take on the pace and color of oriental bazaars. Shoppers can buy anything from hot dogs to fake diamonds without ever going...
...police grow unhappy if the same vendor appears at the same locale too regularly. A technical infraction of one of the city's many complex regulations can always be invoked, and a bust may follow: "If you're unlicensed, the motorcycle cop holds you till the truck comes. Then they take your stuff and hold it all day long at the precinct, until business hours are over. On top of going to court and paying the fines, you get charged $65 for gas and fees for the truck...
...first of the company's Percheron rockets, named after a French draft horse, is being built in a Sunnyvale, Calif., plant by 17 engineers, some of them former employees of NASA. This week the device will be loaded aboard a flatbed truck and hauled to a launch pad at Matagorda Island, about 50 miles northeast of Corpus Christi, Texas, a site that NASA once considered for launches. After testing the prototype, the company hopes to conduct its first orbital flight next year...