Word: contractor
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...relays, men were lowered by a hoisting bucket to dig the rest of the way by hand. It was grueling work. Dirt and rocks as big as a man's head had to be hoisted up bucket by bucket. Burly Bill Yancey, a 38-year-old sewerage contractor who had been on a wartime underwater demolition team, dug for two hours and 20 minutes before he was hauled...
...like all modern aircraft, was first tested while still on the drawing boards. Some manufacturers make scale models of their new airplanes and drop them from high altitudes. As they streak down to destruction, telemetering instruments report their performance by radio. After the airplane itself is assembled, the "contractor's" test pilots have the ticklish job of easing it into the air. In the case of high-speed aircraft, this is generally done at Muroc; civilian pilots like the field as much as the Air Force does. Untested aircraft are shipped all the way to Muroc from the Atlantic...
After the first few flights have proved it airworthy, the airplane is turned over to a military test pilot as his "project." He takes it into the air, loaded with automatic recording instruments, to find out whether it lives up to the contractor's guarantees. Often a hidden defect, perhaps unknown even to the manufacturer, drags the plane out of the air. The pilot's best bet is to make an emergency landing on the broad lake. Bailing out alive from a modern jet plane is difficult; it is also part of the test pilot's code...
...Calhoun, as his name suggests,* looks like a solid Southern gentleman. A handsome 30-year-old with a fullback's build, he has a flourishing export-import business in New Orleans. He also has a millionaire father-in-law-hearty, red-faced William Stevens of Miami, a building contractor in Venezuela since the days of President Isaías Medina...
...eleven, Nebraska-born Art Stoddard went to Texas with his father, a grading contractor who was helping to build the Rock Island Line. Art got a job as water boy at 25? a day. He worked on railroads on & off while finishing school, joined the U.P. as a shop helper. After a World War I stint as a Navy radio operator, he worked up through U.P.'s ranks as a telegrapher, train dispatcher, trainmaster, assistant superintendent...