Word: whaled
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Boston's famed Heart Specialist Paul Dudley White, 70, an energetic mountain climber, wood splitter, bicycle rider and whale hunter (to take their pulses), welcomed a snowstorm to help demonstrate one of his favorite maxims: "Hard work never killed a healthy man." Unpuffingly shoveling snow piled behind his Beacon Street office, Dr. White advised all healthy folks to take exercise in keeping with their age and general physical tone, build up to exertion slowly if they're soft, certainly not refrain from snow shoveling if their only ailment is just being 70. Said the doctor with some concern...
...Whales & Glands "[He is] gifted with such wondrous power and velocity in swimming as to defy all present pursuit from man," wrote Herman Melville of the finback whale. "This leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable Cain of his race." Captain Ahab and his men felt the same way, concentrated on other, slower beasts (notably the sperm whale, a species to which Moby Dick himself belonged). But today, with steam power and steel cables, the "unconquerable Cains" of the ocean, the fin and the blue whales,* are hunted vigorously-and among the most interested hunters is modern medicine...
...twilit night last week when eight bells sounded midnight aboard the British factory whaling ship Southern Venturer, breasting the sullen swells of the Antarctic Ocean, it meant "They're off!" The 1957 whaling season was officially open. All hands were ready for the first leviathan. Soon from over the leaden horizon came one of the mother ship's brood of smaller ships, towing a monstrous fin whale by its tail. Then began a mechanized dissection such as Melville did not imagine even in his most tortured dreams...
...with His Head. Drawn up the gaping skidway by steel cables thrumming on giant steam-driven winches, the whale reached the broad afterdeck. A gang of workmen, wielding long-handled flensing knives, sliced off the thick blubber in foot-wide strips. The winches whined again and dragged the naked, bloody carcass 50 ft. farther along the slimy, slippery, half-iced deck to stage two. Here another flensing gang sliced off the meat. A neat, well-directed blow, as from an executioner's ax, severed the backbone at the neck, and the gigantic head (20 ft. long in an average...
...Bigger Than Pigs. To find the whale's gland in a 20-ft. head, Andersen must show uncanny judgment, for a misplaced stroke of the saw could slash through the pituitary itself. In 1956 Andersen retrieved 871 pituitaries from 898 blue and fin whales, got a bonus of half a bottle of rum for every 50 glands. (On other ships, an estimated 30,000 more whale pituitaries were gathered.) An average season's catch of pituitaries will bring the owners of one ship little more than $2,000, but says a spokesman, "our policy is waste not, want...