Word: wingspan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Relieving some of the embarrassment of U.S. riches, the most imposing swimmer on the premises was actually a West German, Michael Gross, 20, a world-champion freestyler and butterflyer with the wingspan of a pterodactyl. But even he was overhauled in an exciting U.S. relay and by a 17-year-old Aussie, Jon Sieben, in a butterfly. Though the Australians and also the Canadians had their moments, the drama at the pool was fundamentally and expectably intramural...
...dull. Taylor, 64, is a former World War II fighter pilot who built his tiny, all-metal experimental plane several years ago from a plan by retired Aircraft Designer John Thorp. He flew around the world in the little ship, which weighs 1,500 lbs. empty and has a wingspan of 21 ft. 11 in., and set a number of speed and distance records. He decided to donate the plane to the Experimental Aircraft Association at its convention in Oshkosh, Wis., and flew in from Phoenix by way of the Pole. The trip north across Canada required seven hops...
...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...
...studying Summa's hard-to-find financial records, Merrill Lynch estimated that between 1970 and 1976 the corporation had lost $131.7 million. The company, for example, spent about $50 million to maintain the legendary Spruce Goose, the huge, 400,000-lb. wooden flying boat with a 320-ft. wingspan that Hughes had piloted once for a distance of a mile in 1947 and then stored away in a Long Beach, Calif., hangar. Other losses flowed from the hotels that Summa owned but managed haphazardly, a company formed to promote blood-analysis devices, Football Today, and a worldwide fleet...
...there's no spontaneity at all. They've got little pieces of tape everywhere, and if you stand in the wrong place they go crazy." The Pinkies' new stage show is an extravagantly literal representation of the album, including a smoking bomber with an 18-ft. wingspan that buzzes the audience on a guy wire and huge floats representing the song's major characters, among them a 30-ft. mom who inflates to appropriately daunting proportions with the throw of a toggle switch. There is also, of course, a wall, soaring 30 ft. above the stage...