Word: wrecker
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Road Hog. In Baekke, Denmark, a befuddled autoist honked impatiently behind an auto wrecker that hogged the road for 12½ miles, later protested angrily to the salvage company, learned to his chagrin that he was the drunk the wrecker had been towing home...
...dormitories. On one street they named "Liberation," the retreating Communists set fire to the post office. Across the way, they reduced the telephone exchange (servicing 4,000 lines) to a pile of splintered glass and twisted wire. In the city's outskirts, they did a first-class wrecker job on a power plant. Besides crippling communications, the Reds wrecked 52 Kalgan factories (including flour, match, soap, and soy-bean sauce), depriving families of 3,000 workers of their livelihood...
...Argentine-bred Rico Monte, five lengths ahead of the Kentucky Derby winner, Assault. His time-2:42 2 4/5-clipped a fifth of a second off Jamaica's 1⅝-mile track record. Stymie paid off at a handsome 5-to-1. Reason: practically everybody bet on a record-wrecker named Lucky Draw (TIME, Sept. 23), who seemed a cinch to become the "Horse of the Year" after smashing six track records in his last eight races. Lucky Draw finished eighth; the top weight and the distance were too much...
Washout. In Casper, Wyo., seekers for secondhand bathtubs sought out the wrecker of a 56-room hotel, found the hotel had been bathless...
Down the Drain. There were further experiences of this kind, more run-ins with the "power-drunk sadists" of the NKVD. One day Gershgorn "sprang up in sudden fury and rushed at me, screaming 'Saboteur, wrecker, rascal! Take this-and this!' His huge fists were crashing into my face like a couple of pistons." At last Kravchenko decided that he had had all he could stand. When no one was watching, he ripped a portrait of Stalin from the wall, tore it into shreds, flushed it down a toilet. "I listened to the gurgling of the water...