Word: underground
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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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...
Problems of health mounted with the hours spent in the rank, fetid air underground. Few shelters had adequate heat, light or latrines; most were dank and unventilated at best. Children slept with their parents under blankets left underground for weeks on end. Milk for babies could not be heated if it was brought in. Nightly inspection trips were made by doctors and Red Cross nurses, but medical attention was still makeshift. One shelter doctor, who worked at a children's hospital by day, was responsible for 5,000 men, women and children at night...
...children themselves none of this was as important as the prospect of a blacked-out Christmas. They planned to trim the bare steel girders of the big underground shelters and to set up Christmas trees, to have carols and mince pie. But the youngest moppets were afraid that London's anti-aircraft crews might shoot at Santa Claus...
...young Protestant seminarians in 1939, only 100 were permitted ordination after their views had been examined by State officials. The other 900 refused to Nazify their faith, went into training in underground Confessional seminaries for certificates which Confessional congregations will accept in lieu of ordination. Cut off from any possibility of salaries from Nazi-levied church taxes, they must live on the scant $45 a month which the Confessional Synod can allow them...
This brought under city ownership the longest underground transit system in the world-130 miles of subway routes (London. 75 miles; Paris, 70). Together with an additional 120 miles of elevated lines, it carried 2.255,000,000 passengers during the last fiscal year, more than were carried by any other railroad. But the below-cost 5? fare-politically inexpedient to change -has piled deficit upon deficit on New York's subways. Not until 1982 will the last of the present transit debt be paid off. Fortnight ago, an apprehensive Citizens Budget Commission put the total ultimate cost...