Word: platte
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Like an eggbeater marching through a bowl of Wheaties, Air Force Lieut. Colonel Charles H. Platt Jr. led his wife and four children through the crowded, throbbing Military Air Transport Service terminal at suburban Tokyo's Tachikawa Airport, largest military airbase in Japan. MATS clerks straightened, for Colonel Platt was notable local brass: he was commanding officer of the MATS terminal. Off on a 14-day leave in Hawaii, Platt called for booking-six seats-on the Pacific Express, a 41-passenger C-118 due out within minutes on a U.S.-bound milk...
...clerk pointed out that the flight was already overbooked. Colonel Platt knew-but the clerk did not-that two inbound planes from Korea were delayed and that at least eight passengers on them were going to miss their connections with the Pacific Express. Irritably, Platt changed his request to an order. Panicky, the MATS men took an easy out, bumped seven emergency-furlough passengers-one lieutenant and six enlisted men-off the Pacific Express passenger list to make way for the colonel, his family and luggage. When some of the victims tried to plead their emergency problems-a dead...
Magic Number. As the Pacific Express roared down the runway into the night, six of the bounced airmen clustered around a Red Cross worker in Colonel Platt's terminal. At Red Cross suggestion, A/1C Cole Y. Bell, trying to make it to an injured brother's bedside at Fort Campbell, Ky., tried to telephone the Fifth Air Force inspector general's office, with no luck. At that point a veteran sergeant suggested: "Why don't you call General Burns? If anyone can help you, he can. I used to serve under...
Large Legend. Turning back unescorted, the C-118 jettisoned 1,800 gallons of fuel so that it could touch down safely at Tachikawa. There it found a one-man, three-star welcoming committee on hand. General Burns had driven eight miles from his home in Fuchu to put the Platts off, put the bumped airmen back on, and order an investigation. Last week, the investigation over, a six-officer board blamed "administrative error," found Platt innocent of bumping the G.I.s, pointed to the fact that the Pacific Express had indeed gone off with eight empty seats-just as the colonel...
Such minor worries and a mountain of large ones shadow the new college; a new science building is blueprinted, for instance, but the money is not in the bank. But President Platt speaks optimistically: "Our problem is to sustain momentum, but the idea has taken hold. The kids have been dropping back all summer long to see how the new dorm was going up, and to meet the new faculty. Cross-fertilizing the sciences and humanities is looking less like an impossibility...