Word: sprucing
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...visitor knows this. Still, the Spruce Goose is a surprise. The mind is ready for a ponderous bad joke. The funny name suggests this. So does the knowledge that for more than three decades Hughes hid the enormous wooden flying boat, with its 320-ft. wingspan (it is the largest plane ever built), behind security so tight that some of his hangar maintenance men never got to see the aircraft. The big hangar itself, a cantilevered, air-conditioned marvel on Terminal Island at Long Beach, Calif., is being demolished now, sold off by what is left of Hughes' Summa...
...Hughes' orders for flotation. A few of them are still kicking around inside the great, hollow fuselage. The outside of the Goose is a beautiful white, though it was aluminum colored when it flew. The ribbing inside looks like metal, but it is in fact neither metal nor spruce but laminated birch stuck together with glue. Everything is enormously outsize. At their thickest point the interior of the wings is 11 ft. high. A big man can walk out easily inside the wings to inspect the eight 28-cylinder Pratt & Whitney engines, the largest radial engines ever built...
...would go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, had best steer clear of M.S. Sunward II. Of the 750-odd passengers who pack aboard the spruce white ship in Miami each week for a voyage to the Bahamas, few will later recall ever having seen seas, let alone a lonely sea. On Sunward II and most other cruise ships operating out of U.S. ports, sea and sky are props for a floating fantasy sitcom vacation that promises to be more naughty than nautical. Aboard Sunward, which steams only 380 nautical miles in the course...
Take Love Story, Bobo Holloman's nohitter, or Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose. Each set a hard act to follow with initial success. Each fell on its face trying to follow it. With the whole world breathing down your neck and the gallery screaming for your head, the pressure can make all but the strongest crumble like a Famous Amos in the vise of an angry Sumo wrestler...
Travaglia and Lesko met William C. Nicholls, 32, a church organist, at a downtown hotel. They commandeered his sports car and drove to Blue Spruce Lake outside Pittsburgh; they shot him, weighted him with rocks, and dropped him through a hole in the ice while he was still alive. Finally they sped past Patrolman Leonard Miller's squad car three times, until he gave chase and stopped them. They shot Miller dead at the side of the highway. After their conviction for his murder, Travaglia leaned over a courtroom rail and asked Prosecutor Tim Geary: "Are you happy...