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...Alphabet Soup. At Vandenberg the crews get their most crucial training. Few get a chance to fire an actual missile like last week's. But they come close to the real thing with the help of the Atlas T-601 Trainer, an $800,000 simulator in which each crew must spend from six to eight hours a day for two weeks. The trainer has all the gear of a real block house, plus the machinery by which instructors can crank out data on 200-odd possible missile malfunctions. It is the trainees' job to run their countdowns...
Whenever the child's hand touches something, the teacher takes the other hand and spells into it by touch-alphabet the name of the object: doll, water, mother, mug, spoon. The child imitates the hand motions, but does not understand. Yet repetition of touch-spelled words in a framework of discipline is the only way that a spark can ever jump the distance between imitation and imagination, so the teacher is rough and unsentimental. The child kicks and slaps, and the teacher slaps back. The famous ten-minute fight between them is fully as long and exhausting on film...
...began to write before I knew the alphabet. Sabbath was an ordeal for me, because writing was forbidden." His writing drew on traditional sources, since from childhood he studied the Bible, Torah, and, secretly, the cabala. "Cosmic riddles were actual in my home. . . . One could as easily have questioned the validity of reason as the existence of God. . . . The worship of reason was as idolatrous as bowing down to graven images...
...grounds, not counting, an elaborate Food Circus with 60-odd food bars. "Beefsteak saute with button mushrooms, filet of sole Marguerite and crab Louis are nonchalantly dispensed by bill-changing vending machines in 18 kiosks. Elsewhere, visitors may buy fish and chips, Mongolian steak, Belgian waffles, Cyrillic-alphabet soup from Yugoslavia, and Seattle scones...
...longtime touring marksman for the Winchester firearms company, a Texas gunsmith's son who won the unofficial title of world's greatest sharpshooter in a 1907 shooting match during which he gunned out of the air all but nine of 72,500 pine cubes the size of alphabet blocks, only stopped then because he had exhausted all the .22-caliber ammunition In San Antonio; of heart disease; in San Antonio...