Word: trunkful
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...burls from which the gaudiest veneers for furniture are made result from a tree disease somewhat similar to boils. Nobody knows what causes burls, as nobody knows what causes cancer. They form most often underground where the roots join the tree. Burl diggers notice a slight swelling of the trunk at the ground level, dig down, chop off the roots and lift out the burl. The surgery required for burls above ground is more simple; they are just sawed...
George Fortescue rolled up his platypus robe, slipped it into a trunk, carried it on his travels until his death in 1914. It then went to his daughter Viola, who paid even less attention to it than he had. Recently, friends urged her to find out its worth. She took it to Revillon Fréres, smart Manhattan furriers, who this week began exhibiting the piece for Fifth Avenue window-gazers. Unofficial appraisal: intrinsic value-under $10; possible rarity value...
...bedridden, living in pigsty disorder, she stayed up half the night filling gaily bound notebooks with illegible maxims intended to be sold at Woolworth's. A typical letter of her last days reels off to her daughter a fearful jeremiad of grievances, dark suspicions, comments on the latest trunk murder, cries out: "Oh! how I admire that man Hitler!" She was, said Kipling, "the most wonderful person I have ever met. ... It is outside all my experience, and of a type to which I know no duplicate...
Young Henri drew pictures almost as soon as he could read, but at the age of 14 he broke a leg. The fracture was never properly set and a year later his other leg was broken too. Toulouse-Lautrec became a dwarf, shortsighted, blubber-lipped, with a normal trunk and tiny, shriveled limbs. Only 4 ft. 6 in. high, he could not lift an ordinary suitcase off the ground, had special sausage-shaped luggage designed for him. Fortunately, although his aristocratic family could not stand the sight of him, they kept him well supplied with cash...
...Buffalo. N. Y., Big Frank, elephant at the city zoo, was given a birthday party: with one swing of his trunk he engulfed a frosted birthday cake, packed it down with 50 Ibs. of hay. carrots, beets, as a special postprandial treat was permitted to chew