Word: skipper
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Skipper. Born in San Francisco, Pierre Salinger* was a child prodigy at the piano, at the age of six impressed an audience at Toronto's International Exposition by rippling off a Haydn sonata...
...band whomped up a rousing Sousa march on a closely guarded pier at the Charleston (S.C.) Navy Yard dock. Osborn, 42, stepped aboard the nuclear Polaris submarine George Washington, in whose vast holds huge quantities of provisions-from missile-shaped cigars to cigar-shaped missiles-had been stored. Then Skipper Osborn bellowed a time-honored order: "Cast off all lines!" Soon the sub pointed her bulbous nose down the Cooper River and headed for sea to inaugurate a new era in the arcane cold-war art of keeping the peace...
Hidden from enemy eyes, safe from enemy attack, her nuclear-tipped priority cargo of 16 Polaris missiles constantly at the ready, George Washington was bound on history's first underwater missile patrol. Skipper Osborn's orders were secret, but best guesses were that he would take station beneath the subarctic waters of the Norwegian and Barents seas. Cruising within 1,200-mile range of Soviet targets from Moscow to Omsk (see map), George Washington will be joined by her sister ship, Patrick Henry, within two months. With their total of 32 missiles, the two ships will of themselves...
...Navy has an elaborate, secret "Fail-Safe'' countdown system that would prevent any captain, or any other officer who has cracked under the tension of his job, from declaring war on his own. One key provision: no missile can be fired without the joint order of the skipper and his executive officer...
...Noting the inherent risks, the Manchester Guardian Weekly observed last week that the skipper-executive officer team at sea thus becomes "as effectively a nuclear power as, say, Britain or France. The choice of these men, and their discipline and training, must be far more exacting than anything which has gone before...