Word: railroads
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...encounter considerably more heavy fighting in the South when he takes over from Westmoreland. Fortunately for the U.S., intensive fighting is an art at which Abrams has long demonstrated both instinctive mastery and uncommon zeal. Born in Feeding Hills, Mass., the son of a repairman on the Boston & Albany railroad, Creighton Abrams grew up learning to drill tin cans with a rifle, raising baby beef as a 4-H farm boy, and driving around in his Model T. In high school he was both an outstanding student and captain of a championship football team that went unscored upon...
...fully installed industrial plants, complete with Soviet technicians, in exchange for iron ore and petroleum that the Iranians are only too glad to unload. Five other East European countries have followed Russia's lead, and together they have agreed to build him 19 major factories, 500 miles of railroad and a pipeline that will carry natural gas from the gulf to the Caspian...
...well-researched study-a matching piece to his earlier book, The Bootleggers-often seems as rambling as its subject. Like its heroes, it travels at a leisurely pace. But by and large, its heroes are amiable men to travel with. Even the self-righteous Allan Pinkerton, whose railroad detectives were the bane of post-Civil War hoboes, was a tramp once himself, and he never quite got over it. While the Pinks were running down the men they called "miserable communistic outcasts," Pinkerton himself felt compelled to confess "an irrepressible impulse to go a-tramping" again. He went...
...romance has largely disappeared from the road. Gone are the days of the fraternity, when messages from Dick the Stabber, Wingey Ed and Denver Flip might be found scribbled on every railroad water tank. The decline of the railroad, the rise of the mechanized farm, and the welfare state have just about finished off the career hobo as a mass phenomenon. But he still flourishes in the national mythology. And his descendants live, says Allsop, in the hippies "on the lam from the daily grind," in the restless American who prizes and praises his ultimate freedom of choice, "the right...
Rebecca West once observed that "the railroad stations are the cathedrals of America." She was referring to the architecture-and romance-of another era, and it seems unlikely that she would accord the same accolade to that waiting room of the mid-20th century, the nervous, noisy jetport. For travelers in a hurry, it is all too often a place for enforced contemplation, while airlines catch up with their weather-beaten schedules. Novelist Hailey gives airports his familiar Hotel treatment, and the result may permanently ground all his readers...