Word: dekes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Houston and best remembered for his calmly professional performance in Mission Control during the near-disastrous flight of Apollo 13. Neither side has made its final selection of crewmen, but the U.S. front runners include: Tom Stafford, a veteran of Gemini 6 and 9 and Apollo 10; Donald ("Deke") Slayton, the hard-driving 48-year-old chief of flightcrew operations for the Manned Spacecraft Center; and Jack Swigert, a veteran of Apollo...
Their feelings are expressed by former scientist-astronaut Brian O'Leary in his book, The Making of an Ex-Astronaut (Houghton Mifflin). O'Leary denounces what he calls the undisguised "test-pilot dominance" at Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center. Largely at the insistence of Donald K. ("Deke") Slayton, the influential director of flight-crew operations, only experienced military and civilian fliers have been chosen for Apollo crews. Such skilled aviators were surely essential on the first space flights. But now that flight and landing techniques are well developed and scientific experimentation has come to the fore...
...from their schedule. Seeing the boys together, you begin to realize how hard they've worked to get good. Some of their stuff is certainly a product of "that Motown magic," as Motown publicists put it, meaning Motown President Berry Gordy and Songwriters Fonso Mizell, Freddy Perren and Deke Richards, who wrote Love Child for the Supremes. The tunes they are given are good black pop, the rhythms authentic rhythm and blues. But it takes some kind of private and personal magic for a twelve-year-old like Michael to sound convincing in a lyric like this...
...Dear Deke...
...became business for corporations and convenience for the housewife. After political interferences, the men in the program had changed as well. They could not manage to get their pre-rehearsed first words from the moon straight. No one dared anymore to put a sign in the capsule window reading, "Deke Slayton is a turtle." The entire enterprise seemed fanciful and wasteful...