Word: cactus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...nothing to eat but cactus, and after five days my mother said she could not go on," recalled Ernesto da Silva, 17, sitting in a rocky field in the drought-burned eastern state of Pernambuco. "She was a widow but not old. She lay down by the road and told me to go. A man gave me 40? for a day's work. I bought food and hurried back to my mother, but when I got there she was dead...
Through rolling backlands in the five states that form Brazil's eastern bulge, crops of beans, corn and sugar cane were dead; 2,000,000 people gnawed cactus, dug holes in dry river beds for water or joined a dogged, starving march to the sea. The flagelo da seca, the dry whip that lashes the bulge country on the average of once a decade, was in its third month of fury. Some 370,000 flagelados (whipped ones) supported themselves and their families on relief wages of 30? a day -half the food allowance of a Brazilian army horse...
...Forget." But the Senate balance is much too close and much too flexible for Lyndon Johnson to get anywhere just by confining his attentions to Democrats. "Cactus Jack" Garner of Texas once told him: "No leader is worth his salt unless he has friends on both sides of the aisle." Lyndon Johnson...
Tourists or newsmen who wandered close to Beautycoon Elizabeth Arden's Arizona Maine Chance health-and-beauty farm last week were brusquely shooed away by grim-faced guards who sprang from behind cactus clumps. A total of 21 armed men-six Secret Service agents, six members of the Arizona highway patrol and nine Maricopa County sheriffs deputies-guarded the place around the clock, seven men to each eight-hour shift...
...surly band through the parched badlands. Food and water run short, a chance band of Villistas pins down the party with rifle fire, and Thorn, rather than risk one of his heroes, hands over their horses. The men call it cowardice. The plot becomes as thorny as a Chihuahua cactus until, with the last shreds of his officer's prestige. Thorn flogs the men and the woman toward Cordura. By the time the wanderers, addled by the sun and gut-racked by the alkaline water, reach the hideous end of their journey, Novelist Swarthout has sketched a powerful case...