Word: rightnesses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After checking into Belfast City Hospital in 1976 for one of his few legitimate visits (he had fallen and fractured his right leg), Mcllroy made a few brief appearances at other hospitals and then disappeared for more than a year. The two investigators assumed that he had died. But he resurfaced at a Birmingham nursing home last June, then at hospitals in Ireland and Scotland, and was discharged from another one in London as recently as August. Diagnosis: Mcllroy is alive -and still ailing -in the British Isles...
...RIGHT STUFF by Tom Wolfe; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 436 pages...
...oaken voice of Walter Cronkite echoes in the memory of America's entry into the competition. There were resonant suspense at lift-offs and tremolos of pride at splashdowns: America still had the right stuff, Wolfe's buzz word for the indefinable attributes of the astronauts. His long awaited book about test pilots and the Mercury flights recalls those years through the eyes and nerve endings of the first astronauts, their wives and even the conditioned chimpanzees who rode prototype capsules downrange from Cape Canaveral: The chimp's &"heart rate shot up as he strained against...
...even the creakiest practitioner of the inverted-pyramid style of journalism will have to agree that behind the mannered realism of The Right Stuff thumps the heart of a traditionalist. The organizing principle of the book is an old-fashioned fascination with, and admiration for, the test pilots and fighter jocks of the U.S.'s first astronaut team: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton. In addition, the book has a superhero, Chuck Yeager, a World War II combat veteran who broke the sound barrier in 1947 and rewrote aviation history...
Yeager dips out of Wolfe's pages as the undisputed king of the right stuff, the man whose no-sweat, West Virginia drawl sounds like the archetype for modern airlinese ("We've got a little ol' red light up here on the control panel that's tryin' to tell us that the landin' gears're not... uh ... lockin' into position"). He is also the book's main foil, a member of a vanishing breed of hot-rock pilot in an age of increasingly automated flight...