A native of Mississippi, Meeks had been part of an all-black crew loading munitions on warships at Port Chicago, on an inland waterway 35 miles east of San Francisco.
Residents and emergency medical workers in eastern Ghouta posted a cascade of heart-rending images: a family with five children pulled dead from the rubble; families huddled in basements and dugout shelters; an ambulance crew loading a patient, then fleeing moments before an explosion hits.
Blackhawks designed to carry 11 passengers ignored standard operating procedures; one crew loaded 31 evacuees into one of the helicopters.
Afterward, as the rest of the crew loaded the boat and equipment onto the trailer, Paradis gave me a tour of the expanding river mouth.
On Nov. 17, he watched the ground crew load the casket into the cargo bay of an Austrian Airlines flight, bound for Dulles Airport.
On Thursday afternoon, he and his crew loaded up an open two-seater golf trolley with a small flatbed attached and made their way, through the heavy downpour, to feed the workers.
"It's a sort of consecration in the life of a fireworks artist," Mr. Chouillier said last Friday as his team, aided by La Ronde's own crew, loaded aerial shells up to a foot in diameter into firing tubes.
And then the ground crew loaded up the center aisle with the flower pots, earth and all, a score of them blooming with African daisies, begonias, morning glories, nasturtiums and something vaguely petunia-like and purple.
The industry's precariousness was apparent a few weeks ago at the Gamesa factory, as a crew loaded the guts of the company's newest model of the component, a device known as a nacelle, into its fiberglass shell.
The crew loaded their results into Soyuz TM-29 and departed Mir on 28 August 1999, ending a run of continuous occupation of the station which had lasted for eight days short of ten years.
Given that I was indeed Byrne's ride — the veteran art rocker's conveyance on a recent afternoon to a concert in San Diego — I accepted the bright-orange carrot-and-cayenne concoction, then slurped it down as a member of Byrne's road crew loaded his bike onto one of several tour buses idling outside the hotel.
