Word: underground
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Most common parental excuse for hooky-playing was the need to secure shelter space. By 9 every morning swarms of ferret-eyed, wax-skinned youngsters lined up with piles of bedding outside the tube shelters, waiting to go underground to hold the family "pitch" till nightfall. Inside they played on the long platforms of the subway stations, kept an eye open for the chance to steal a better sleeping space. Said one experienced moppet: "School? I got to get the seats ain't I? ... Ma goes home to do her work and sends me back to keep her place...
...crowded underground shelters of London have many drawbacks. One is that they stink. Another is that the air in them is laden with germs. Last week in the Lancet, Scientists Charles Claud Twort and A. H. Baker of the Portslade Laboratories in Sussex came out for an old-fashioned way of doing away with disagreeable smells which is a newfangled way of doing away with germs: burning incense...
Across the Ohio River from Louisville, Charlestown, Ind. (pre-defense pop., 850) was bewildered and irritated last week. Du Pont engineers were building for the U. S. Government a vast, sprawling $50,000,000 smokeless-powder plant of 100 buildings (some reportedly underground for air-raid protection) on 6,000 acres of woodland. At first Charlestowners had been as elated as small boys by this windfall. But by last week their town had grown to 5.000. Where there had been three people to a house, there now were twelve. Rents doubled, trailer camps toad-stooled, a carpenter lives...
...lines were down. Western Union lost 800 poles, 2,000 crossarms, had 100,000 wire breaks. In Amarillo 100 telephone poles toppled (throughout the storm area, 2,200). Radio towers went down. When electric power failed, Amarillo's water supply went dry, for 10,000,000 gallons stored underground could not be pumped to the surface. Amarillo's fire department, answering many false alarms, had only enough water for 15 minutes of real fire fighting...
...with glamor-boys and pretty co-eds. This time it is dear old Bailey U. that takes the alma mater honors and the life is quite a revelation. Armed with forged Groton diplomas and a beer-hall background, Maxie and stooge Sid Silvers crash Bailey to run an underground bookie racket and take the students for an expensive ride on the ponies. From there on it is a mad chase from physiology classroom to basketball floor to the girl's dormitory to R.O.T.C. drill field to Junior Prom, with Maxie and Sid double-crossing their chief on a fixed race...