Word: trunkful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...sharply. The newsmen, fellows who always manage to be called to work on their own moving days, did not understand. They traced the license number on the maroon convertible, noted slyly that it belonged to perennial Youth Leader Joe Lash; they noted that a Navy truck had delivered a trunk...
...alone was not to blame. Boston was cursed with absentee ownership. Only one deep-sea shipowner was left in the New England city that once was the greatest port on the North American continent. Labor troubles, management troubles had to be handled laboriously through agents and middlemen. No major trunk railroads gave the port a tinker's damn...
Equally alien is Caldwell's account of an efficiency of desperation which might drive Americans mad but seems to work in Russia. Prize samples: 1) On the trunk highway from Moscow to Smolensk, an unbroken line of supply trucks moved day & night at a constant 20 miles per hour, without collision even when traffic was doubled. Reason: collision would have meant liquidation for the colliders. 2) Russians took orders so literally that one railroad-crossing guard refused to raise the bars and let Caldwell's stalled car get off the tracks to safety; a train was approaching...
...loading a ship, as in packing a trunk, the heaviest cargo is usually put in the bottom. But wartime cargoes are loaded not by common sense but by code. Washington supplies a code breakdown with instructions on where to stow each item. If orders put Item XA in the bottom hold, there Item XA must go, whether it turns out on arrival to be eggs, airplanes or cigarets...
...post-war Berlin she edited a woman's magazine for the Ullstein publishing house, took up writing again in desperation to pay doctor bills for her two sons. From her trunk she dragged a half-made romance about people in a big hotel which, with 40 days' work, became Menschen im Hotel-in English, Grand Hotel, one of the hits of the decade. It brought Vicki Baum to Manhattan and Hollywood, where she "fell in love" with...