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Glossary
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193 Glossary A&P. Short for the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, A&P was founded in 1859 and was once America’s largest food retailer, with 14,000 stores nationwide in 1930. Today, it has shrunk to 456 stores concentrated on the eastern seaboard. In Manitowoc the A&P was on Washington Street in the vicinity of the Mikadow Theater and a tavern called, quite innocently in those days, the Gay Bar. Big Chip. A nickname for the Chippewa Flowage, located in northwest Wisconsin near the city of Hayward. Formed by the damming of the Chippewa and Chief rivers in 1923, it is Wisconsin’s third-largest lake and covers 15,300 acres or about 24 square miles. A labyrinth of peninsulas , bays, islands, and floating bogs, it can be hard to navigate but affords excellent fishing and wildlife viewing. car ferry. Car ferries were large steel ships that crossed Lake Michigan between Wisconsin and Michigan. Primarily, they carried railroad cars around the Chicago bottleneck, but they also carried automobiles and passengers. One ferry, the S. S. Badger, still sails out of Manitowoc, but it no longer carries railroad cars. 194 Glossary CCC. The Civilian Conservation Corps was one of the most popular and effective New Deal programs enacted to fight the effects of the Great Depression. From 1933 to about 1941, the CCC provided work, lodging , and food for hundreds of thousands of unemployed young men. They did forestry work, planted trees, worked in national, state, and local parks, and constructed many miles of roads and trails. The program was estimated to cost $1,000 per man per year. “CCC boys” were paid $30 a month, of which $25 had to be sent home. Checkers speech. On September 23, 1952, Richard M. Nixon, the Republican candidate for vice president, made one of the first political speeches to be televised nationally. He had been accused of accepting $16,000 (some said $18,000) in illegal campaign contributions; Democrats and some Republicans called for him to leave the ticket. Nixon used the speech to rebut the charges, calling the accusations a smear and claiming that he had spent the money not for personal needs but for office and travel expenses. In the speech, Nixon threw mud at his political opponents and summarized an audit of his personal finances, which showed modest assets and liabilities. He denied the assertion that his wife, Pat, had a fur coat, claiming that she wore a “respectable Republican cloth coat.” Nixon did, however, admit to accepting one personal gift, a blackand -white cocker spaniel, which his little girls named Checkers. In the most memorable lines of the speech, Nixon said his girls loved the dog and that he was going to keep it, no matter what. No one, of course, had ever suggested that the Nixons should return the dog, but the use of Checkers as a “straw dog” worked and Nixon stayed on the ticket. cigarette machine. Now almost extinct, cigarette machines were once a fixture of every bar, restaurant, lunch counter, and bus station. Customers in the early ’50s would insert a quarter, or at the most 35 cents, pull a knob, and receive a pack. Knowledgeable smokers confined their choices to the most popular brands—Camel, Lucky Strike, Pall Mall, [3.88.16.192] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:36 GMT) 195 Philip Morris, Old Gold, and Chesterfield—because they were the most likely to be fresh. Slower-selling brands like Fatima, Kool, and Herbert Tareyton sometimes dried out in the machine. DeSoto. The DeSoto was a medium-priced, moderately successful automobile sold by Chrysler from 1929 until 1961. For some reason, it was named after the early Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto. During its first years, the DeSoto was an upright and boxy car, but in the late 1930s it was given low-slung, streamlined styling. The DeSoto may have been doomed from the outset because it had to compete with its Chrysler stablemate Dodge, as well as Studebaker, Willys-Knight, and various General Motors cars. The 1961 DeSoto was pathetically ugly, with tail fins, four headlights in a slanted configuration, and two grilles, one above the other. Door County. The peninsular “thumb” of northeast Wisconsin, extending into Lake Michigan. Once a bucolic place of cherry orchards, small farms, cozy clapboard villages, and commercial fishermen, it has been extensively citified and commercialized by upscale tourists, retired people, and the canny locals who cater to them. Its scenic beauty, most of it preserved within five...