Word: westwards
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Appointed writer-in-residence at Radcliffe College, Miss Pamela L. Travers specified only that she would like a rocking chair and a westward-looking window ("You see," she explained, "my thoughts have always looked westward"), and then allowed that back in 1934 she hadn't really "written" Mary Poppins at all. "I don't think you can just sit down and think up a Mary Poppins," said she. "I prefer to believe that she brushed by like a bird, and I put salt on her tail...
...Prairie wagons were built for maneuverability and speed-but were not expected to outlast their westward journey. Steamboat racing became a popular passion, despite its appalling accident record: between 1825 and 1850 at least 150 major explosions on western steamboats ("half boat, half alligator") killed more than 1,400 people. The railroads, hastily and flimsily built, also had an appalling accident rate. No one seemed to mind that railroad travelers were jammed together in long boxlike cars without distinction of social class and that stopovers were brief. In time the quick lunch-counter meal became an American institution; gregariousness...
...Westward, Ho! the commonplace was endowed with the transcendental values; the primeval forest became a refuge for reflection and repose. Both attitudes became enshrined in the American litany, and even today te preservation of America's natural beauty is a key credo of all conservationists. what gave vision to this concept was the work of such artists as Thomas Cole of the Hudson River school. Cole, as Poet Bryant rhapsodized, painted "pictures which carried the eye over scenes of wild grandeur peculiar to our country, over our aerial mountain tops with their mighty growth of forest never touched...
...Cole's wilderness was nothing compared with the expanses found by the artists who, from the 1840s onward, Set out to answer the cry, "Westward, Ho!" Freebooters, poets and discoverers though many of them were, they rode the rafts with fur traders, saddled up with military expeditions, visually discovered, in the still nomadic Indian tribes, a world adying, and saw in the lonely plains and mountains a new testing ground. Outstanding was Albert Bierstadt, whose monumental views of the Rockies, with their Wagnerian thunder and soaring rainbows , earned him $35,000 a canvas. But so rapidwas the conquest...
Anxious to follow the westward flow of industry and begin tapping the booming Chicago market, Jones & Laughlin, the nation's sixth largest steel producer, started looking over possible Midwestern sites last summer. Its conditions: plentiful water, a youthful labor supply in the area, easy rail access and cheap land. With the aid of Fantus Co., the international plant-location experts, they considered half a dozen possible sites, finally settled on Hennepin as the one best meeting the requirements...