Word: capping
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...deter a hefty, partially crippled, 34-year-old Belgian mining machine manufacturer named Fernand du Moulin. Around 10 o'clock one night last week Fernand left a champagne party given by his wife, anointed himself with grease and took to the choppy waters off France's Cap Gris Nez. He struck out with a powerful breast stroke, stopping now & then to tread water and consume 20 fortifying pints of soup and coffee doled out by a friend in a fishing boat. En route, carrier pigeons released by the escort winged their way back to France to keep...
...curtain mercifully fell on the hammed-up Hamlet, a voice from the balcony yelled: "Author, author!" A stir ran through the audience aboard Cap'n J. W. (Bill) Menke's Goldenrod, last of the Mississippi's showboats, and up to the footlights stepped one of William Shakespeare's belated collaborators, Cap'n Billy Bryant, onetime showboat king of the Ohio. Hollered the voice: "Shoot him dead...
...Cap'n Bryant, 58, who gave up his own boat six years ago, could afford to beam at this stunt; today's showboat skipper can usually count the house by counting the hoots. For eleven weeks, St. Louis playgoers had gone down to the Goldenrod's mooring by the cobblestoned levee and paid 75? a head to sass the actors in his hokum-logged version of Hamlet. Last week, on his way home from a lecture tour, Bryant tarried in St. Louis for five days to give the classic a fillip: his own appearance in the double...
Landlubber. In the moldering, sway-backed Goldenrod, twice sunk and salvaged in her 40 years, it takes an eye as knowing as Cap'n Bryant's to find wistful hints of glories past,* when she was the biggest, flossiest playhouse afloat. Those were the magnolia-scented days when the showboats moved as regularly as the spring floods and, according to legend, a Bayou mother could say of her child, "He'll be foah, come next floatin' showhouse." Today, twelve years after the Goldenrod became a virtual landlubber at her St. Louis mooring, Cap'n Menke...
Catfish in Season. Perhaps the greatest change-and the hardest for Cap'n Menke to swallow-is in the customers, now mostly heckling wiseacres from the big city. "When the folks come in from the little towns where we used to play our shows straight, from Golconda and Shawneetown and Chester, they look at me with a sad expression," he says. "Our shows've been spoiled, they say; the old days are dead." Then, toughening up, he adds: "Of course, we don't care what they come for, just as long as they lay their money down...