Word: lear
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even in death William Powell Lear is still generating turbulence. As the holder of 126 patents, Lear made a fortune and, amid considerable bitterness, bailed out of two of his most ambitious ventures. In 1962 he left Lear, Inc. after the board of directors turned down his demands that the aircraft-instrumentation firm build jets. In 1967, when sales initially failed to take off, he sold Lear Jet Industries Inc. to the Gates Rubber Co. Two years before he died of leukemia in 1978 at age 75, Lear started a new firm, LearAvia, in Reno, to manufacture a turboprop corporate...
...project, however, soon ran into headwinds from two of Lear's daughters. They are disputing their father's will, saying that the trustees, Auld and Real Estate Developer Milton Weilenmann "brought undue influence" on a sick man to have the new plane completed. The heiresses declare that the risks of the venture are too great for their mother to use their portion of the inheritance...
According to its boosters, the Lear Fan could well reshape general aviation technology. The lightweight airframe is made from rolls of graphite mixed with epoxy resin wrapped around molds like vinyl wallpaper and then baked under pressure in an oven the size of a boxcar. The unpainted fuselage looks like a black plastic drainpipe but it is as tough as titanium; only carbide-tipped drills can cut through it. Pratt & Whitney engines concealed in each side of the plane drive the distinctive 90-in. propeller sticking out of the back of the plane. Because it weighs only...
...forgetting, and her profoundly affecting chronicle is seeded with ideas and warnings. The antimedical book was born out of a moral demand: as long as patients feel the lack of care, as long as doctors act with an omniscience that is only an act, volumes like Cousins' and Lear's will continue to resound with cries from the heart. And the stethoscope will not be the best way to hear them. -Peter Stoler
...account of a good man's death is bound to be moving. But Heartsounds is far more than case history. Martha Weinman Lear is a born writer, and the resonances in her prose go back to Greek tragedy with its catalogue of grief and noble despair. By the cathartic ending, when there are no more tears to shed and no more afflictions to remember, Martha Lear is finally able to forgive. She realizes that the professionals could not per form a miracle: "The doctor does not exist who could treat such a gravely ill patient for such a long...