Word: checkerboard
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...aluminum arms were folded against the satellite's side. As the solid-fueled third stage was about to fire some 150 miles above the earth, they snapped out into position. Each arm branched in two directions and each branch carried a flat paddle about the size of a checkerboard, covered with 2,000 silicon-based solar cells mounted on a thin plastic honeycomb (an elaboration of the light-collecting window in Vanguard I, which still draws in enough energy to keep the tiny satellite busily broadcasting 17 months after it was launched). At 22,000 m.p.h...
...human upheavals vast enough to change the physical look of a large part of the earth's surface was the collectivizing of Soviet agriculture. One hundred and eight million Russian peasants were forcibly torn from the traditional checkerboard of their individual farms and resettled in a new pattern of huddled hamlets dotting the forest-wall-to-forest-wall carpeting of huge collectively tilled fields. This battle for collectivization, Stalin told Churchill, was harder to win than the war against Hitler, and he killed or starved to death an estimated 6,000,000 Russians in winning it. In that battle...
Flying over Kansas, a Navy pilot gazed down at the checkerboard of wheatland below, suddenly spotted four huge letters plowed across one field near Marienthal (1950 pop. 250). The alarming message: HELP. The pilot quickly passed the word on the radio that someone was in trouble down there. Police found the distressed party. Farmer Joe Wing, who had just finished plowing under part of his wheat crop to meet U.S. acreage restrictions. "I was just hoping," he explained, "that Ezra Benson might see it if he happened to be flying over...
...land where the U.S. grows its food and fiber, the majestic checkerboard of spring was beginning to form. The plains and rolling hills of Illinois and Iowa, where farmers were turning the soil for this year's crop of corn, were a geometric pattern of black and brown and green. On to the West and South, through Kansas and into Texas, the spreading, endless fields of wheat were coming green and beginning to ripple softly in the wind. In the Deep South, across the bottom of Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, green shoots were peeking out of the ridges...
...Donald was squeezed out of farming by the size of his family. He went to work selling Bibles-three different editions for teachers, three for home use and, along with them, a discreet book on sex fundamentals. By the time he married Thelma Carver, Donald had a job selling "Checkerboard" feeds for Ralston Purina, later was hired by the Armour Fertilizer Works, for which he is now district sales manager. Perhaps because he never had a chance to do much of it, Donald loved farming-a love that he passed...