Word: whitney
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...years after World War II, Whitney itself began to show alarming signs of going modern. Young soldiers came home, got into politics and began to run the town. They put through bond issues for new water and sewer systems, for paving and lighting the streets. Construction of the vast Whitney Dam began on the nearby Brazos River and new people thronged in. A hundred new houses were built...
Twenty-seven years ago dusty, somnolent little Whitney, Tex. (pop. 2,000) became the recipient of a homely but extremely functional civic improvement: Druggist D. ("Doctor Dee") Scarborough installed a pine bench in the shade outside his store. The bench soon became as integral a part of Whitney's life as the Plaza in Santa Fe or Fountain Square in Cincinnati...
...Whitney's housewives sniffed the spirit of change, suddenly rebelled. After years of submissively sidestepping the bench and its occupants (some of whom had a roving eye and a ribald tongue), a delegation of housewives called on young Mayor Fred Basham and told him to do something about it. The mayor agreed. One morning Whitney's oldtimers discovered, with cackling chagrin, that their sanctuary had been ignominiously lugged into a nearby alley. They angrily drew up a petition asking that it be put back. Cried one: "They done it in the night like a thief-if that bench...
...Whitney's housewives redoubled their cries. Complained 70-year-old Mrs. T. E. Bagley: "They must spit about two or three gallons a day! They ain't died fast enough, these old men!" Tom Rose, 97-year-old dean of the bench sitters, replied with spirit: "Come here in '77 from Tennessee, been married 76 years, and my wife ain't whipped me yet! What do they want us old folks to do-hide in the woods...
Died. Alexander Fell Whitney, 76, militant $17,500-a-year president (since 1928) of the 216,000-strong Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen; of a heart attack; in Bay Village, Ohio. Whitney once vowed to unseat President Truman after the unsuccessful 1946 rail strike ("You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and you can't make a President out of a ribbon salesman"). He later backtracked and gave Truman all-out support. Said the President in his message of condolence: "[He] became . . . the exemplar of the philosopher's teaching that...