Word: poisoning
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week, like pennant losers looking forward to next year, homeowners across the U.S. besieged garden stores for poison to kill off this year's waning crab grass, spades and shovels to dig it out of their lawns, sturdy seed to protect them against its ravages again in the spring. In Chicago, Vaughan's Seed Co. estimated that its 1959 lawn chemical sales are running 50% ahead of last year. In Marysville. Ohio, O. M. Scott & Sons, biggest U.S. lawn supply house, looked forward to a $30 million year, up $6,600,000 over record 1958. Said...
...flasheries, says they have no meaning; the real secret is contained in a doubly locked metal box, which he opens in the presence of no man. He is probably telling the truth, for the best guess entomologists have made about his methods is that he knows just how much poison a starling can take without dying, sprinkles it around while diverting onlookers' attention with his noisy toys. Starlings would not want to go back for more. Perhaps the aluminum tube around his neck is just a long salt shaker full of poisonous bird seed...
Standke denies that he uses poison in his starling system, but admits he uses it on pigeons. Whether his secret is more closely related to biochemistry or to mumbo-jumbo, the bird man is in interesting company: the sixth labor of Hercules was to rid the Arcadian city of Stymphalus of its rasping birds. "When Hercules was at a loss how to drive the birds away," writes Apollodorus, "Athena gave him brazen castanets ... By clashing these, he scared the birds. They could not abide the sound...
Diving in Austria's Toplitz Lake for counterfeit British currency printed by Nazis in World War II (TIME, Aug. 10), a salvage team came up with a dividend. Their catch: the personal files, diaries and identity cards of Nazi Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler, who killed himself (poison) soon after British troops nabbed...
Though it is the most concentrated poison known (one ounce could, theoretically, kill 100 million people), the botulin did not show its effects until the next day. Then the Gruwells and the four beet-eating Nelsons started to get headaches, feel dizzy, see double. Soon they could not swallow or speak clearly. They were taken to Idaho Falls' Latter-day Saints' Hospital, where their illness was quickly diagnosed. But then the doctors' difficulties began...