Word: zephyrs
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When she first streaked across the plains 21 years ago, the California Zephyr was a gleaming wonder-on-wheels. The first luxury Vista-Dome streamliner to run between Chicago and San Francisco, the stainless-steel train topped 90 m.p.h. on the straightaway, dazzling onlookers at every wayside crossing. Last week the Cal Zephyr, rattling from disrepair and more than 6,000,000 miles of wear, made its through-run for the last time. Latest victim of rising costs, declining patronage and the reluctance of railroads to promote passenger service, the train was, as one member of the Interstate Commerce Commission...
...Speaker. And until death silenced his oratorical thunder in 1963, the Sooner State's Bob Kerr had no peer among the exalted unofficial overlords of the Senate. When Okla homa sent Fred Roy Harris to sit in Kerr's Senate seat, it was like a zephyr taking over from a monsoon. Or so it was assumed...
...friend recalls how, when Johnson was a Congressman during World War II, he informed Cook Zephyr Wright that he was bringing some important people home for a steak dinner. Unable to scrape up enough red ration stamps for steak, Zephyr fretfully asked Nellie Connally, wife of Texas' Governor John Connally, who was then a naval officer, what she should tell Johnson. "Nellie said to tell him that he's just like everybody else," said the friend. "Zephyr thought a moment and then said, 'Well, Mrs. Connally, you know he is like everybody else, and I know...
...bespeaks something significant about the U.S. railroad-passenger system that such a train could lose money -which it does. Western Pacific expects to drop $560,000 on the Zephyr this year, largely because of rising labor and maintenance costs. Conceding that the train "imposes a substantial economic burden on Western Pacific," the ICC nonetheless expressed optimism that the financial picture may gradually improve. One possibility: giving Western Pacific an increased share of the revenues collected jointly by the Zephyr's three operating railroads...
Protagonist of all this dubious effort is a middle-aged account executive, Eddie Anderson, who was born Evangelos Topouzoglou. A would-be Tolstoy reduced to pushing Zephyr cigarettes for an advertising agency, Eddie also moonlights as Edward Arness, writer of hatchet jobs for slick magazines. Anderson-Topouzoglou-Arness is trapped in a Los Angeles "Spanish Renaissance ranch house" with a patient wife, a confused teen-age daughter, a supply of Picassos, tabs from the liquor store, and his mate's meddling analyst. "Asleep in the dell of respectability," he awakes with a whoop after making it with Gwen Hunt...