Word: bearcats
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...rock aviators who converged on Reno for last week's National Championship Air Races divided naturally into two classes. There were the pros, like Lockheed Test Pilot Darryl Greenamyer, 31, who won the "unlimited" championship in a surplus Navy Grumman Bearcat, wrenching his way around an eight-mile course at 396 m.p.h. And there were the purists, like 54-year-old Bill Falck of Warwick, N.Y., who screamed around a 2.5-mile course at 202 m.p.h. to win the Formula I competition. In airplane racing, the difference between the pros and the purists is that purists, like Falck, build...
...Yale philosophy professor, onetime Marine fighter pilot and full-time individualist, whose own philosophy of life was that "it is very short and should be lived to the hilt," a proposition he assiduously followed by buying himself a 500-m.p.h. brute of a war-surplus F-8-F Bearcat, in which he buzzed the Yale Bowl and roared aloft in fantastic aerobatics, sometimes before the enthralled crowds at air shows, more often just for the pure, unadulterated hell of it; when his Bearcat plowed into a hill 15 miles from Cortland, N.Y., on his way to Ithaca, for a lecture...
MOTOR CARS OF THE GOLDEN PAST by Ken W. Purdy. 216 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $30. A nostalgic look at the days when now-vanished beauties such as the Apperson Jack Rabbit, the Pierce Arrow, the Willis Sainte Claire and the Stutz Bearcat tore up American roads. The vintage year was 1929, with its Kissel White Eagle, the Graham-Paige 837 with skirted fenders, the boat-tailed Auburn roadster and the dual-cowled Duesenberg phaeton. Park a while and reminisce...
...that the pilots take off and land on a dirt runway located in front of the grandstand and the TV cameras. The pilots rebelled, insisted on using the paved runways at Reno Airport instead; the dirt, they said, was unsafe. Oh yeah? growled Stead, whereupon he qualified his own Bearcat at 350 m.p.h. and threatened to take the $5,000 prize himself. That did it: the pilots rushed out to qualify in such a tearing hurry that one anxious flyer did not even bother to change out of his business suit, silk shirt...
...another. Then California's Darryl Greenameyer won his first heat, beating Slovak by 10 m.p.h.-and disqualified himself by landing on Reno's paved runway instead of Stead's dirt. Not that Greenameyer didn't try. Stripped of practically everything, including landing flaps, his silver Bearcat hippity-hopped all over the runway until he frantically poured on the power and took off again. Landing safely at Reno, Greenameyer muttered: "I'm going to pick up my jacks and go home before I kill myself...