Word: cooperatives
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Cooper was in other ways disconcerting. He has a passion for fast cars, drives his 1963 Sting Ray Chevrolet at speeds upward of 100 m.p.h. His humor is unpredictable. Before the first Mercury flight, by Shepard, Cooper was asked to demonstrate to television cameramen how the astronaut would ride to the launch pad in a van and enter a gantry elevator for the space shot. Cooper donned a silver space suit, walked to the elevator entrance-and stopped in mock horror. As cameras whirred, he grabbed a girder and screamed: "No! I don't wanna...
Solo at Sixteen. But Cooper's doubters missed a central point. Aimless as he may sometimes seem on earth, he is a man with a mission-"to go a little bit higher and a little bit faster." Explains a close friend: "All Gordon Cooper is, is a pilot. He's a good one and a smart one, and that's all he wants...
...Cooper was all but born in a pilot's seat. A native of Oklahoma, his father was a lawyer, a county judge from Shawnee-and an amateur pilot. Gordo sat in his father's lap during voyages in an old Command-Aire biplane, took the stick himself by the time he was six. As a teenager, he worked odd jobs around the Shawnee airport to pay for lessons in a J-3 Piper Cub trainer. He was inspired, in part, by stories his father told about two famed acquaintances, Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post. Gordo soloed "officially...
...Gordon Cooper Sr. (who died in 1960) became a legal officer in the Air Force during World War II, liked it so well that he made it a career. Gordo enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school graduation, served in the presidential honor guard in Washington, then joined his parents in their home at Honolulu's Hickam Air Force Base. Attending the University of Hawaii, he met a pert drum majorette named Trudy Olson. Among Trudy's attractions: she owned a third interest in a Piper Cub and taught flying. They were married in 1947; and today...
With that background, Cooper could not resist the temptation to trade his college R.O.T.C. commission for an Air Force lieutenant's bar in 1949. He flew F-84s and F-86s with a fighter-bomber group in Munich for four years, earned an aeronautical engineering degree at Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, qualified for the rugged test-pilot duty at the pioneering Edwards Air Force Base in California-home of the world's highest, fastest jet, the X-15. A few years before his selection as an astronaut, Cooper took a friendly flight with another...