Word: luck
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...Good Bad Luck. Over the years Jenkins has cloaked his operations in such secrecy that an intriguing mixture of fact and legend has grown up around his empire building. Born May 18, 1878 in Shelbyville, Tenn., Jenkins showed up in Aguascalientes, Mexico in 1901, dead broke. He took a job as a railway mechanic for 50? a day. In 1906, a U.S. missionary group staked him to enough capital to launch an itinerant haberdashery business...
...wanderings carried him to Puebla, where he went into small businesses (grain brokerage, real estate) and became the U.S. consular agent in the chaotic days following the 1910 revolution. His financial talents were frustrated by a shortage of funds until he had a fortunate stroke of bad luck. In 1920 Jenkins was kidnaped by General Manuel Peláez, one of the bandit enemies of then-President Venustiano Carranza, and held for $25,000 ransom. Rather than offend the intervention-prone U.S., Carranza paid off- and through an unlikely stroke of generosity on General Pelÿez' part, Jenkins...
...Abominable Snowman, New Zealand's famed Mountaineer Sir Edmund HiHary descended into Nepal with only one furry shred of evidence that the Snowman has any more substance than Santa Claus. Sir Edmund's trophy: a scalp that Himalayan natives, who have treasured it as a good-luck hairpiece for some 250 years, believe to be a genuine yeti remain. To get the scalp, Hillary had to do some sharp bargaining with local witch doctors, who feared that disaster might strike if the scalp were taken from their domain. In the end, he got the trinket on a month...
There are pleasant things, to be sure, in all of this, and there is one strong feat of acting. But there is no harmony of mood or certainty of movement; trying its luck with this thing and that, Camelot has made a fish pond of its story rather than a widening stream, and provides an evening that for all its sumptuous adornments seems curiously empty...
Still, counting everything together--inexperience, M.I.T.'s hot courts, and the possibility of bad luck--the Engineers should be easy. But the Army match, to be played at home this Saturday, will be a different matter...