Word: drills
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From the training camp, troops graduate to the volcanic black sand beaches not far away. There, facing the mainland, they build concrete pillboxes, string barbed wire, drill endlessly to repel the invasion from the sea. In their off-duty hours, the soldiers sing a new army song...
...bought a derrick, got an ancient, 3,000-ft. East Texas drilling rig and a leaking secondhand boiler and boldly set out to sink a 6,000-ft. hole in Hardin County. He drafted his father as a tool pusher, his younger brother William as a laborer. It was agonizing toil. Sand ruined the rubber rings in his pumps every half hour; each time, he dismantled the mechanism and installed new ones. The "coffee pot" rig broke down endlessly. He says: "We might as well have been drilling with a high-heeled boot." It took six months to sink...
Blackboard Labor. He took a job as traveling salesman for a textbook publishing company, and it was then that he got his big idea. In classroom after classroom, he had seen children laboriously copying off spelling drills from the blackboard. From his own experience, he knew that the teacher had probably spent hours thinking up the exercises. W.P. began to wonder whether there might not be a simpler way to carry on the drill...
...Bookishness. The world of modern education, as Smith found it, is one in which drill and discipline are taboo, and teachers have become abnormally afraid of boring pupils or straining their abilities. In worrying about such matters, they have long belittled what they call "verbal intelligence" and "bookishness," forgetting that "by far the greater part of man's wisdom is stored up in books...
Smart Amateurs. Owners of small farms were also cashing in. George Parks, a meatcutter who did a little ranching on the side, is now reportedly worth $250,000. Farmer Herman Huckabee is getting $3,500 a month in royalties. Farmer Jackson Ellis could not afford to hire a drilling crew. So he and five of his strapping sons took jobs as roughnecks until they learned how to drill an oil well. Then they bought some secondhand equipment and drilled five shallow wells on their own place, where the sixth and youngest son worked with them as a water...