Word: horning
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...warning horn wails. Then comes a 30-second delay during which a trapped electrician could hit one of the nine handy scram switches and stop further action. Putnam presses a button, and direct current from a roomful of transformers and rectifier tubes flows into Zeus...
...reporting for alert duty, Lieut. Colonel Dante Bulli and his crew in effect braced themselves at the end of a taut, outstretched spring. The trigger was the rasping sound of a klaxon horn. At any moment, that horn might blow. It could mean that a Soviet nose cone was on its way carrying destruction, and that there were 15 minutes in which to get off the ground and head for preassigned Soviet targets. There would be no time for second thoughts, no room for second-guessing as to whether some button-pusher was running a test. To the SAC alert...
...your wife gets moody on the phone." There is no time for boredom. Some sit in seclusion in locked-door study rooms, poring over target data (they never discuss targets with other crews; no crew knows the target of another). And all the time they wait for the horn. There is no itchy tension: their sharp reflexes have been honed by intense training, their character hardened by one of SAC's most successful ingredients-motivation...
...could come again in five minutes or five hours. Usually, though, the alert crews can count on enough time to clean up. "The only time you dare take a shower," says one pilot, "is right after an alert. Some day they'll fool us and blow the horn again just after we get back...
McCoy springs few surprises. A trim, energetic man at 56, he leads his seven-man band through Hot Lips, Basin Street Stomp, and other items of Dixieland "sugar stuff." The arrangements are as predictable as a TV script, and the sound is unexceptional. With his horn in his right hand and his left hand flashing an outsized diamond as he carves out the rhythms, McCoy demonstrates that he can still make a trumpet caterwaul, growl, wail, or punch out notes of brassy clarity...