Word: autopilot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...only fun thing about the Sox's slump is watching Don Zimmer try to figure out what to do. His club has been on autopilot so long, he must be going nuts trying to think of a way out of it. But it will have to end in and of itself, as these things do, and in the meantime, the race in the A.L. East will continue to heat...
DIED. William Lear, 75, restlessly creative inventor whose farsighted triumphs include the first practical car radio, the autopilot for airplanes, the eight-track stereo cartridge and, more recently, the Learjet; of leukemia; in Reno. Throughout a prodigious career that eventually netted him more than 150 patents, Lear delighted in tackling "impossible" problems. Intrigued by the prospect of designing his own plane, Lear severed connections in 1962 with the electronics firm he had founded, anted up $11 million of his personal fortune, squeezed bank loans and tapped his children's trust funds to finance production of the small, streamlined...
...summer of 1975, William F. Buckley Jr. made an Atlantic crossing - chronicled in his book Airborne - aboard his 60-ft. cutter Cyrano. Says Buckley: "All adventure is now reactionary." With loran, radar, autopilot and vintage wines, Buckley was not exactly blown across the ocean on a naked raft. Even the most venturesome solitary sailors today - men like Sir Francis Chichester, who circumnavigated the globe in 1966-67 in his 53-ft. boat Gipsy Moth IV - have the advantage of sophisticated hull and sail design. Says Tristan Jones, a small, bearded Welsh sailor who has circumnavigated the globe three times, crossed...
...Emett Vintage Car of the Future, dedicated to the Spirit of Future Retrogression, is installed at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, and a new suburban Cleveland shopping mall proudly displays his Featherstone-Kite Openwork Basket-Weave Mark Two Gentleman's Flying Machine with its unique autopilot FRED (Freehand Remembering Empirical Doodling system). Starting this month, the makers of Wall-Tex wall coverings will bring Emett's wry whatsits and dotty doodads into the American home with prepasted wallpapers celebrating the inventions he prefers to call Things. Long as they may cling to the wall, they...
Damp Handshake. He campaigns with an awkward, mechanical passion. "Monckton never thought of handshaking as a personal contact with the electors," Ehrlichman writes. "He was doing all that crap on autopilot." At one point the politically smiling candidate escapes from a crowd at the Waldorf by retreating to an elevator filled with his own staff. Once inside, "his face changed as though he had suddenly broken out of a trance; his smile collapsed, his eyes darkened as if a light had been extinguished...