Word: brucker
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...being a good salesman. I don't steal from the poor." He even won some high praise. Ethel Kennedy wrote to say that she had been "moved" by his portrait of J.F.K. and was "looking forward" to his painting of her husband. Former Army Secretary Wilber M. Brucker called his own portrait "a tribute to both your artistic skill and powers of observation...
...come a Yellow Springs, Ohio, advertising man named Roger Brucker, and Richard Watson, a philosophy professor at Washington University in St. Louis, to explain the damp fascinations of caving ("spelunking" seems to be a word not much used by cavers). Their book is a splendid armchair challenge, properly made, properly obsessive. For non-cavers who read it, the sensation of being trapped in Mother Earth's vermiform appendix is persuasively real, and the impulse to run gasping into the open air is strong...
...Brucker, 47, and Watson, 45, are cavers of the first rank. For nearly two decades they belly-crawled toward what they call "the Everest of world spelology," a presumed connection between Kentucky's vast Flint Ridge cave system and neighboring Mammoth Cave. The possibility of such a connection must have occurred to Floyd Collins, the solitary caver who discovered Great Crystal Cave under Flint Ridge in 1917 and who died in nearby Sand Cave in 1925, after being trapped there for 15 days. Collins' grisly death stirred the nation's curiosity, and for years tourists in Crystal...
...Choked Fistulas. The Flint Ridge/Mammoth connection, which would establish the system as the longest known cave in the world, required techniques more organized and rigorous than Collins' lone adventuring. By the 1950s, when Brucker and Watson began caving, it was necessary to survey, with chain and compass, every foot of the miles of new cave then being discovered. Some of the finds were spacious passages and great, vaulted limestone halls, but far more often the explorers tried to keep their nerve intact and their carbide lamps lit while jammed into mud-choked fistulas less than a foot high...
...final connection came in 1972, the authors relate. Brucker missed it because, although he is not a large man, he was not able to compress his body enough to get through a tight spot, now officially labeled the Tight Spot. The most effective member of the connection party was a small (115 lbS.), wiry woman named Pat Crowther. Large, lordly people are handicapped as cavers, of course, and flyweight readers will follow Crowther's muddy tracks with tears of appreciation in their eyes. When she and her skinny companions popped like corks through the Tight Spot and moved...