Word: taciturn
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...that Donald K. ("Deke") Slayton would never forget. On March 15, 1962, only two months before the taciturn astronaut was scheduled to become the second American to orbit the earth, NASA doctors abruptly grounded him. Reason: they had discovered an occasional irregularity in the rhythm of his heartbeat. The bitterly disappointed Slayton subsequently became chief of flight-crew operations at the Manned Spacecraft Center and played a key role in picking all future space crews, including the first men to land on the moon. But even as he sent other astronauts to the launch pad, he never stopped dreaming...
...been particularly anxious to talk. But he did, in fact, provide amiable enough. Looking very much as you imagined Hector Bloom, the Jewish college basketball star of Larner's first novel, Drive. He said, he spoke with an engaging humor to his edgines, though the presence of a taciturn political friend, who contributed an occasional grunt or mumble and proved invisible otherwise, was slightly discomforting. The talk began over omelettes...
...commercial novels about an ad agency. Instead, it is clumsy, serious and painstaking, and perhaps as a consequence, considerably more enlightening. The agency involved is called Gibbs & Wilson, and at G. & W. creativity is king, writers venerated, research unheard of. The hero is Copy Chief Jim Bower, a dour, taciturn fellow known throughout the trade for lines like (to sell a brand of vodka): "Tell your mother-in-law it's potato soup-she'll love it." When Jim sits down to do an ad, he has nothing in front of him but a piece of paper...
U.S.A.F., 36, who will accompany Young to the surface of the moon, makes an ideal foil for his more taciturn skipper. Born and reared in the Carolinas, the easygoing space rookie still speaks in a casual drawl. He has also managed to achieve a space first of sorts. He asked for-and got -grits (dehydrated) on his breakfast menu for this month's moon trip. But Duke's playfulness is deceptive. He was class valedictorian in prep school (Admiral Farragut Academy, St. Petersburg, Fla.), graduated with honors from the U.S. Naval Academy and later earned a master...
Earl Cobb, for one, says the course made him a more understanding listener. It also gave him an idea for a technique that is probably unique in the annals of therapy: to encourage taciturn but obviously troubled customers to open up, Cobb brings his pet fox up from the basement. "A fox is not a very common thing," he explains. "People want to find out about it, so you start telling them about the fox and then they just start talking about their problems...