Word: belled
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This week, partially retired and 62, he was tolling again. His latest book, Crisis in Education (Whittlesey House; $3), rang the changes on U.S. culture as Bell has seen it in a lifetime of observation. Whether readers agree with all of it or not, the book is unmistakably what Author Bell intended: "a challenge to American complacency...
Bernard Iddings Bell is a personable man, but he has never tried to be a popular man. For 40 years, in books and articles, from pulpit and lecture platform, he has been irritating churchmen, ruffling educators, cracking complacencies and smugness. A canon of the Episcopal Church, and onetime warden of New York's Episcopal St. Stephen's College (now Bard College), he calls himself a radical independent. As such, he has become one of the most caustic critics of the manners & morals of his day. There is scarcely a sector of U.S. civilization for which Bell...
Indecent & Undisciplined. Actually, says Bell, Americans have very little to be complacent about. The most accurate mirror of their civilization, he contends, is the Henry Aldrich radio skit; the typical American boy is no longer Tom Sawyer or Penrod, but Henry Aldrich himself. He is "almost indecently adolescent . . . undisciplined, self-assertive, bewildered by life
...when a B-29 took off from Muroc with his odd, fat little airplane nestled under its bomb-bay. Chuck's small craft had no propeller, no intake for a jet engine; only four rocket orifices in its stubby tail. The little airplane, the Bell X-1, was as daring a challenge to the unknown as the Wrights' first faltering biplane...
...Love. Test Pilot Yeager knew all this when he prepared to fly the Air Force's odd little Bell speedster. He took over the X-1 from a civilian test pilot, Chalmers ("Slick") Goodlin, who had flown the ominous little ship at Mach .8 (eight-tenths of the speed of sound). Goodlin was offered a fat reward (a rumored $150,000) for flying it at full speed, but he did not like the terms. Another civilian pilot had a try at the X-1 and hastily bowed out. Then the Air Force took charge and gave...