Word: yazoo
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Federally controlled levees along the Mississippi generally withstood the soaking, but a few were overtopped by high water. Along tributaries like the Missouri, St. Francis and Yazoo rivers, locally and privately financed levees and dikes were in many cases even less able to resist the increased pressure. President Nixon surveyed the flood regions from aboard The Spirit of '76 at the end of the week and pledged "full federal support for their recovery and rebuilding efforts." Even the eldest Mississippians could not remember such biblical rainfalls (57 in. since last October). Said one: "Everything that could be flooded...
Downriver, the damage was greater. In Mississippi, the hardest-hit state, another two inches of rain fell on the Yazoo River Basin, making a total of 51 inches in the past six months. The soaked earth could hold no more; at Vicksburg, where the Yazoo River meets the Mississippi, the water reached 7.4 feet above flood stage, the highest in 36 years. Farm land and equipment in the surrounding Delta lay under eight feet of water in some places, making the recovery and repair of equipment almost impossible on many small farms. Trembling cattle huddled on islands of high ground...
...Yazoo by Willie Morris (Ballantine) Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago...
Good Old Boy by Willie Morris. 143 pages. Harper & Row. $3.95. In North Toward Home, the former editor in chief of Harper's told about a grownup visit to his tiny home town, Yazoo City, Miss., back in 1967. This book, written for his son who lives in New York, celebrates Morris' boyhood in Yazoo before World War II. It is drenched in crawdads, squirrel dumplings, Delta woodlands, and Peck's-bad-boy jokes. But Morris eases out of realism into fantasy and back with no strain, and it's nice to think that somebody more...
...Yells. Many of Yazoo's kids, Morris says, objected to being sent to private segregated schools. The public schools had their traditions, not the least of which were athletic, and the influx of black players added measurably to the quality of Yazoo's teams. Black and white athletes even began exchanging soul slaps on the field. White cheerleaders picked up black musical cadences in their pep yells...