Word: make
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...crust of the con man, the deftness of the dip, the skill of the safecracker. The professional cheater will buy a machine ($400 and up), take it home to his workshop for devoted scientific study. Disassembling it, he will examine each reel, spring and screw. How best to make his entry? What tool will do the job? What part of the mechanism should be jimmied with what tool? Then comes careful experimentation until at last he discovers the machine's weak spot: the locked door, or a tiny opening for a wire, or a vulnerable glass plate. After patient...
...Drill. Some thieves use a tiny, battery-powered electric drill concealed in their sleeves, make a little hole in the machine (see cut), insert a wire into the works, and by careful manipulation "walk" the reels until they stop at the jackpot position. But since freshly drilled holes are too easily detected, other jackpotters have fashioned keys with which they can unlock machines and stop the reels by hand. A first-class crook can walk the reels, hit the jackpot in 30 seconds flat and, before the change girl appears, slip his small tools to an accomplice, who ambles away...
...jackpot. "Hell," says one disgusted slot-machine mechanic, "you could surround the thing with sheet metal, and they will find a way to beat it." Yet for all the troubles with the professional jackpotters, there are always enough honest, ordinary suckers around to make the one-armed bandit history's healthiest highwayman...
...stately progress from Paris to Bonn to Washington, Britain's popular press had clamorously accorded him one diplomatic triumph after another (MAC DOES IT AGAIN), as if one intransigent ally after another had been converted to Macmillan's concept of what kind of deal the West might make with Russia over Berlin...
...only suggestions to "study." During his visit to Moscow, Macmillan apparently became convinced that Nikita Khrushchev is obsessed with fear that the U.S. intends to attack Russia at the first opportunity. Macmillan's conclusion: the way to cure Khrushchev of his obsession is for the West to make public admission-at least by implication-that Soviet mastery of Eastern Europe is a "fact of life" that the Western powers do not intend to try to change by force. For doing this, the West might get new assurances of its rights in Berlin...