Word: zephyr
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...word carousel, Tobin Fraley informs us, is derived from the old Italian carosello, meaning tournament. The term came to refer to the medieval Moorish practice of training mounted swordsmen on wooden horses attached to circling beams. In The Carousel Animal (Zephyr; 127 pages; $19.95) Fraley, an Oakland, Calif, restorer of antique merry-go-round animals, closes the distance between this forgotten martial art and the magic of the amusement park. Gary Sinick's photographs of stallions frozen in mid-prance, oversize rabbits, frogs and chickens reveal the wealth of detail and coloration that distinguished the finest carousel craftsmen...
...Grande Zephyr, the last privately operated long-haul passenger service in the Lower 48 states, was about to be shut down. Its operator, the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, said the train was losing $3 million a year. The new operator would be the National Railroad Passenger Corp., the Government-subsidized organization known as Amtrak. The old cars with their rump-sprung seats would be replaced with Amtrak's firm-chaired, bullet ride to modernity. The cuisine of the dining car, a draw for serious trenchermen, would be replaced with Amtrak food, no adjective necessary...
...smell of bacon lay heavy on the morning air, spreading from a car with the name "Silver Banquet" flung back along its flank. "It is truly the last one," said Steve Patterson, a locomotive engineer with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe and a man who rides the Zephyr mostly just to eat. "All the other passenger trains anywhere you go in this country all look alike. I call them generic trains. The little old Zephyr was all we had left. They had the last dining car. I tell you, the rest is airline food. They cook it somewhere else...
...crank up entirely new designs when they are needed. Admits lacocca: "We have to say, 'Do you want vanilla or chocolate?' GM says, 'Do you want vanilla, chocolate or strawberry?' " Later this year, for example, Ford will roll out its replacement for the rear-wheel-drive Ford Fairmont/Mercury Zephyr, known as the Tempo/Topaz. The totally new designs will have front-wheel drive and aerodynamic styling for greater fuel economy, advances that would have been impossible with Ford's old models...
...most important new autos on the boards are efficient-looking compacts to replace the Fairmont and Mercury Zephyr. Cars in the new line, code-named Topaz, have a four-cylinder engine, front-wheel drive and a sloping hood. They are designed to compete head-on with the Chrysler K-cars, the Dodge Aries and Plymouth Reliant, and the General Motors X-body models: the Chevrolet Citation, Pontiac Phoenix, Oldsmobile Omega and Buick Skylark...