Word: yeager
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...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 in experimental rocket-powered planes of the '50s and early...
...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...
...their missions' being controlled by earth-bound technicians. The chosen seven had pulled out of enough tight corners and survived enough glitches to rise to the top of what Wolfe, in a seizure of cliché avoidance, calls "the ziggurat." As a reminder that he was there too, Yeager told reporters he did not want to be an astronaut because they did no real flying. He then rubbed it in by saying that "a monkey's gonna make the first flight." Shepard, Glenn and company bucked back, demanding and getting concessions like an override control stick and windows...
When Brooks arrives in Phoenix to begin his film, everything goes wrong. He follows Mrs. Yeager to her gynecologist, only to learn that the doctor (Johnny Haymer) has already enjoyed TV stardom in a 60 Minutes expose of "baby slave auctions." Yeager himself proves to be the most colorless veterinarian ever recorded on film. Local eyewitness-news teams descend on the Yeagers, transforming a TV stunt into a media circus. Finally, an exasperated studio chief (played as a disembodied speaker-phone voice by real-life Studio Executive Jennings Lang) clamps down on the project. He sternly reminds Brooks that reality...
...ELIOT--David Lakhdir '80, John Ordway '79, John Ramig '80, Jerry Rappaport '80, Douglas Tweedale '80. KIRKLAND--Mark Anderson '79, Pat Fischer '80, Lorraine Hayes '79, John Kopchik '80, Tim Sellers '80. LEVERETT--Mike Calabrese '79, Nick Christakos '79, Jane Fayer '80, Gideon gil '79, Carl Rosen '80, Jay Yeager '79. LOWELL--Laura Besvinick '80, Linda Bilmes '80, Jim Deutsch '80, Peter Fleischer '80, Fred Haber '79, Jeff Wills '80. MATHER--Sarah Carpenter '81, John Gilbert '80, Maxine Pfeffer '81, Libby Pierpont '81, Elisabeth Rozen '81, Robert (Skip) Stern '81. NORTH HOUSE--Alexander Bok '80, Kim Jones '80, Sam Levin...