Word: yam
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...North Carolina on a hot July night in 1950. A column of 30-odd cars carried the Ku Kluxers through tobacco, cotton, peanut and sweet potato fields, then drove slowly along the streets of Tabor City (pop. 2,028), a sleepy Tarheel town that likes to call itself the "yam capital of the world...
Pogo is a bright-eyed, cuddly little critter, as amiably shapeless as a Teddy bear, with a head like a hairy zero, a nose like an overboiled yam. He lives somewhere in the happy absences of Georgia's vast Okefenokee swamp, with his friends. Among them: Albert, a raffish alligator who smokes cigars, courts a skunk with a French accent, and describes himself as "handsome, brilliant and modest to a fare-thee-well"; Howland Owl, a foolish old bird who crosses a "gee-ranium" plant with a yew tree, hoping to get a "yew-ranium" bush for an atom...
Chemical Trick. Some hormones are not difficult to make in this way. Syntex Inc. of Mexico City, for example, has been making sex hormones (testosterone, progesterone, etc.) out of an inedible wild yam called cabeza de negro, which yields a substance containing the four-ringed steroid nucleus. But cortisone is tougher. For one thing, its molecule has an oxygen atom attached to one of its carbon atoms (No. 11), and to place that oxygen in the correct spot is a difficult chemical trick...
Within a year, says Syntex, it hopes to make as much yam cortisone as is now produced from cattle bile. In three years, when its new $2,000,000 plant is finished, it hopes to supply enough cortisone for the entire U.S. demand...
...Michael V. DiSalle, 42, yam-shaped Democratic mayor of Toledo, was named to the $16,000-a-year, trouble-laden post of price stabilizer. No businessman, Lawyer DiSalle had made a good record as chairman of Toledo's Labor-Management-Citizens Committee (The Toledo Plan) that has minimized the city's labor trouble for five years; he had the endorsement of Toledo's industrialists and the good will of labor leaders for the price-stabilizing...