Word: vespa
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Last week Genoa's Piaggio & Co., makers of Italy's first scooter, the Vespa (wasp), invaded the U.S. market with a roar. Sears, Roebuck & Co., which had ordered 1,000 Vespas as an experiment, sent a rush order for 5,000 more by September, and Piaggio prepared to supply Sears with up to 2,000 a month thereafter. Price...
...biggest wartime producer of aircraft engines. At war's end, with most of its main plant destroyed and a ban on plane-making, Piaggio started building scooters patterned after the collapsible motor scooters used by U.S. and German paratroopers. Only 65 in. long and weighing 185 lbs., the Vespa had a 4½ horsepower engine in the rear one-tenth the size of those in standard American motorcycles. Yet it did 43 m.p.h. (a souped-up model has been timed at 125 m.p.h.). The Vespa caught on at once...
...want a faster program of social reform. At the other end of the Demo-Christian spectrum is a right-wing faction which wants less social reform (notably, less land reform). Its members are known as the Vespisti, because they meet in the club-rooms of Rome's Vespa motor-scooter club...
...Amleto Vespa was born in Italy, became a secret agent of Chinese War Lord Chang Tso-lin in 1920 and a Chinese citizen in 1924. When the Japanese took over Manchuria, they also took over Amleto Vespa. He was useful to them for his knowledge of the country, and for his status as a European who nevertheless could not claim the protection ''of a European country. According to Amleto Vespa, the Japanese forced him to become their agent by threatening his wife and children. Secret Agent of Japan is his account of his experiences from 1932 until...
...conquest of China, he claims, the Japanese sold monopolies in gambling, prostitution and opium to racketeers. But individual officers and police (there are five distinct Japanese police forces in Manchuria, often at odds) sold protection to other racketeers and kept for themselves money intended to pay for Japanese arms. Vespa organized gang raids against rivals of the monopoly (his European birth minimizing interdepartmental conflict, since officers blamed him rather than the army). A fascist and an admirer of Mussolini, Vespa nevertheless believes that "the nations of the world are committing a most terrible mistake in dealing with the Japanese...