Word: pratt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Picked up a Pratt & Whitney J52 jet engine that had been under low-priority development for planes for two years, used it to power Hound Dog, which is like a pilotless bomber...
...speech had been particularly suitable for the 50th anniversary of South African nationhood. "We shall not be killed!" he shouted to the thousands of whites in the grandstand. "We shall fight for our existence, and we shall survive." He took his seat beside his wife Betsie, not noticing David Pratt, a wispy, 54-year-old Transvaal farmer in green tweeds, who clambered briskly up the concrete steps behind the Prime Minister, flashing his exposition-committee-man's lapel badge to get past the husky detectives...
Mounting a photographer's chair to get closer to the Prime Minister, the stranger spoke, and Verwoerd turned to shake the hand of a presumed greeter. Instead he stared at the point-blank muzzle of a .32 automatic. Pratt fired twice, and South Africa's Prime Minister lay on the concrete aisle, blood spurting from two holes in his cheek and ear. His wife flung her arms around him, crying "What's happened? What's happened?" Then she fainted. Verwoerd's personal bodyguard, Major Carl Richter. was a few feet away when, belatedly, he realized...
Seized by astonished guards, Pratt was hustled through the angry crowd, crying "God help me!" Verwoerd was laid on a stretcher, rushed to Johannesburg's Gen eral Hospital.*After tense waiting, word came from the surgery: Verwoerd's jaw was shattered in two places, and his palate was punctured, but he would live...
Eccentric Farmer. The assassin's motive was still not clear, although he was known to hate Verwoerd's National Party. Born in England, Pratt was educated at Cambridge, has lived for 17 years in a 25-room mansion on his 1,000 acres of the rich veld 20 miles west of Johannesburg; there he breeds prize Ayrshires and, in a concrete-lined trout run, raises fish for Johannesburg restaurants. A gentle, kind man who collects guns, Pratt has a history of epilepsy and a tendency toward sudden violence. Last year, after his Dutch wife left him for another...