Word: zippo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...started buying things-ridiculous things. I got a Zippo lighter with scenes from the Mardi Gras painted on both sides. I got $1.50 athletic shirts that had been made up for teams that never claimed them, and bore obscure and worthless insignia. I got jackets in styles that were so passe they were almost chic again. And on my way out I got that pure-wool sweater for $6.98, in quiet tribute to a dream deferred...
DIED. George G. Blaisdell, 83, founder of the cigarette-lighter company from which he received his nickname, "Mr. Zippo"; in Miami Beach. An oilman, Blaisdell noticed a wealthy friend using a cheap, efficient Austrian cigarette lighter and realized that a demand existed for such a gadget. Blaisdell, a trained machinist, marketed his own windproof model on which he gave a lifetime guarantee and, persevering through several years of poor sales, became enormously successful during and after World...
...which produced a generation of new skeptics among newsmen. In Asia, young correspondents like David Halberstam of the Times, Malcolm Browne of Associated Press and Neil Sheehan of United Press International challenged the efficacy of U.S. policy with mounting impact. CBS showed Marines firing peasant huts with their Zippo lighters. Seymour Hersh, then a freelance, made Americans share the burden of My Lai. Contention over the war dragged on for a decade. The press appeared increasingly to be part of the opposition to two Administrations, a role
Sometimes the thieves will even approach a farmer and offer to cut his deadwood. Then, says Craig Beek, head of Iowa's Bureau of Criminal Investigation, "Zippo, like a flash, they'll take your walnut trees too." Another ploy is to approach the landowner and ask to buy the trees, promising payment when they are sold to mills. The cutters then disappear with the logs, and the farmer never sees them again...
Killing was the reality for which the G.I. invented the largest number of euphemisms: zapping, fragging, offing, greasing, waxing, hosing down a village (or using a Zippo Squad to set it afire). When Lieut. William Galley testified that he had been ordered to attack My Lai, he did not say that he had been told to kill but to "waste" everyone in sight...