Word: yarns
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...manufacturing process in Spalding's Chicopee, Mass, factory appreciably changed. Each ball must conform to rigid specifications, set decades ago by the leagues. Its horsehide cover conceals a cork core wrapped in two layers of rubber and 490 machine-wound yards of five kinds of yarn. Even the cover must meet a fine thickness tolerance of .045 to .055 of an inch. The finished ball must weigh in (5 to 5 1/4 oz.) and measure up (9 to 9 1/4: in. around...
...assurance that today's sluggers are hitting the same old ball is confirmed by its chief seamstress. Mrs. Beryl Gauthier, 49. Mrs. Gauthier heads a crew of 75 women who finish the ball-making process by closing the cover seams with exactly 108 double stitches of red yarn. No baseball fan ("Who's Roger Maris?"), Seamstress Gauthier is firm about her craft: "The ball is just the same as it ever...
...warned that unless he bought nylon tires, he dared not drive at high speeds. Leering down from billboards, other ads warned him that if he did buy nylon tires, his car would start shaking him up like a concrete mixer. Battling to supply the $300 million worth of reinforcing yarn used in the 105 million tires made each year in the U.S.. manufacturers of nylon and rayon cord were waging one of the bitterest and least restrained advertising campaigns in modern business history...
...spouse she could not lament less; matters tinkle prettily when the wedding guests toast the bride. Matters are brightest of all by way of Eddie Foy's flings and flashbacks into American vaudeville. When Foy dances on his knees, or his feet seem caught in twisted yarn, or he just sidles off from Ireland and the show, he provides literal footnotes to a great vanishing tradition. But when the show slides back to Ireland and Broadway, all distinction is lost. The doings can be colorfully corny enough, the songs respectably melodious enough, but everything breathes a strictly-for-export...
Cruelty & Indifference. Joan Williams, 32, now lives in Connecticut, but she remembers her small-town Southern youth with remarkable precision. The Morning and the Evening is a carefully controlled yarn, which has as its hero the village idiot of a small Mississippi town. What seems at first like another Southern Gothic construction, with heartstrings, quickly becomes something more important. No near-helpless, mute man of 40 can arouse an emotion much stronger than pity, but the reactions of neighbors to his helplessness and his own vulnerability to cruelty can tell a great deal about man's eternal debt...