Word: tubs
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Striking from the great morose forests of the Aberdare Range, Mau Mau terrorists last week hacked an elderly Briton to pieces as he sat in his evening tub. A quick chop of the pangas and all his fingers were gone. In the port of Mombasa, supposedly awed by the guns of a British cruiser, a British marine was stabbed...
...tossed in. According to Heddy Schumacher, the housemother, no one has yet complained of any icebox raids. On each floor there are also drying rooms with laundry facilities, and two bath-rooms, with two baths and six showers. One freshman complained that as she was sitting next to a tub on the first day of the term wearing only a man's shirt the door suddenly opened and a man walked through, pausing only to give her a bewildered glance. That occasion, however, is apparently singular...
Journalism has produced few more plausible hoaxes than H. L. Mencken's famed essay on the history of the U.S. bathtub. Mencken's yarn explains how a Cincinnati grain merchant named Adam Thompson caused the first tub to be constructed of sheet lead and Nicaragua mahogany back in 1842, how he built a pump with which a team of six Negroes lifted water into a tank in his house, how he ran a heating pipe through his chimney, and finally took the first modern bath...
Gaining speed with every paragraph, it further relates how President Millard Fillmore was captivated by the contraption after sloshing around in it on a stumping tour, and, despite adverse public opinion, had a similar tub installed in the White House in 1851. Although there is not a word of truth in the whole account, and Mencken has confessed his amiable duplicity repeatedly, connoisseurs of historical anecdote have been snapping it up for 30 years. It is doubtful, however, that any of them ever seized on it as tenaciously as President Harry Truman...
President Truman has said that after he retires he plans to do some writing and lecturing on U.S. history. He might fill out the Fillmore bathtub lecture with a few paragraphs on the 1,800-lb. tub (see cut) especially constructed for oversized President William Howard Taft...