In flight training at the naval air station at Lake Pontchartrain, Archer never missed a chance to go into town for a little nightlife. Tall and thin, eyes hooded by drooping lids that made him look sleepy all the time, he was improbably adept at getting girls. He told them his eyes looked that way because of an injury from shrapnel. The line worked so well on the girls at New Orleans’s Copa Cabana Review that Archer became a semiregular patron of the Roosevelt Hotel, convenient for high-style rendezvous. So notorious was he among his fellow cadets for his stays in that hotel’s Blue Room that
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