Word: chockablock
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...stormed the nation's armories. To them, a three-year hitch in the National Guard or Organized Reserves (with regular drill periods near home) looked much better than a 21-month hitch as a draftee. By the time the President signed the law, the reserves were chockablock with new recruits, and the Guard was almost over its national goal of 341,000 enlistments...
...deep. It was dry and powdery on top, packed solid beneath, ideal for skiing. Above towered the two mountain giants, Languard and Julier, up to their waists in dark green firs. On a terrace, its streets white-carpeted with snow, lay the famed resort town of St. Moritz, a chockablock jumble of low, square houses and great, ugly, expensive hotels. Villagers, doing their day's marketing, dodged visiting skiers in the streets. Crowded little St. Moritz (pop. 2,500) had set up 4,000 extra beds, which would not be nearly enough. For St. Moritz this week...
Four million families needed a place to live. The Government, which had hoped to build 250,000 houses by the end of the coming winter, now felt it would be lucky to provide 40,000. Like Japanese everywhere, families were living chockablock; the average citizen had only six square feet of housing space. In Tokyo's Ushigome ward, authorities held a lottery to determine which of 19,000 applicants would get the 416 new houses. About 2,000, including women with babies on their backs, slept in the subway; others grubbed for a roof in rusty tin sheds, converted...
...cousin to the late King Alfonso of Spain, and he drew himself up to his full 5 ft. 7 in. when doubters wanted to stick pins in him to see if he had hemophilia. He had no Hapsburg lip either, but he did have cigar boxes chockablock with $1,000 bills, though no one ever got really close enough to find out if they were real. He scooted around in a Duesenberg and gave fancy dinner parties (guests remembered, later, that a waitress always read the menu...
...eleven years (four of them in Army service at Fort Richardson, near Anchorage), he had been appalled to find as many as 18 natives living chockablock in one small, stove-heated log cabin. He knew that T.B. would never be checked unless cases were isolated. He also knew that the natives' resistance to the white man's plague had been greatly lessened by their narrow, unbalanced diet, by the introduction of white men's fire water, soft drinks, candy and carbohydrates...