Word: shoveling
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Dulled by months of malnutrition, monotonous argument and the sapping vices which poverty invents in idleness, the actual pick-and-shovel men of the miners' union were scarcely aware that their condition had been brought to the whole country's notice. All they knew was that dressed-up visitors seemed more numerous in the valleys and that, perhaps as a result, the valleys seemed more quarrelsome...
...imperial majesty, the Shah [of Persia] was to turn the first shovel of earth. At the same hour and minute . . . signals were to be conveyed to the governor generals of the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, who, representing the king of kings, were to go through the same ceremony in their respective domains. . . . The date . . . was not an auspicious one because the moon was not in its proper phase and the work was set back two weeks...
Rollo Holliday, Harvard undergraduate, was found early yesterday in a shovel of coal in the Boston and Maine railroad yards in Somerville. He was in a state which was pronounced by an ambulance surgeon to boarder closely on torpor, but more experienced, if less technical, observers asserted that he was merely out. No further explanation of this term was offered. It was accepted without question by the police...
...station house, young Holliday refused to give his name. He was unable to account for his presence in the shovel, or to give any logical excuse for himself. Friends, summoned by the police, said that he had been in a state of exhiliration for days, but that they had no reason to suspect his actions to be more than normal. Documents in his pockets led police to believe that information on the case may be gained elsewhere, and the New York authorities have been apprised of the circumstances...
...tunes in strange hieroglyphics comprehensible only to himself. Now he presents them as The American Songbag.* There are some 280, and, like the family piecebag, they are of all colors and patterns. There are songs of sailors, of miners, of lumberjacks, of loggers, of hobos, of prisoners and pick & shovel men, of washerwomen, bandits and railroad gangs. They tell stories, of pioneer memories, of the Mexican border, the "big, brutal cities," the Southern mountains, of five different wars. This one came from a Santa Fe buckaroo, that one from the Leavenworth penitentiary. Mr. Sandburg places them all, gives...