Yup, that is the school house chapter and verse indeed.

The original 727-100 had blocker doors which were VERY effective, but I guess the stress on the reverser and resultant high maintenance cost spelled the end of the doors and the birth of the cascade system.

This fiddling with the reverser levers trying to just pull on the middle handle and steer the plane and work the brakes was not very practical while going down the runway at 200 feet a second! What we ended up teaching was - when it's wet, delay the reverse until the nose is on the ground. In a crosswind, nobody held the nose off. It took only 2 or 3 seconds to smoothly lower the nose to the runway and starting to deploy the reverser as the nose was coming down took about the same time.

On touch down, first you deploy the speed break, then as you started the nose down you would pull on the reverse levers. The levers would stop at the interlock detent and you could feel them unlock. Then we would yank them to the 12 o'clock position (max) and quickly go forward to about 11 o'clock. That would give you around 1.60 EPR. We would try to be at idle reverse by 80 knots so as not to get a compressor stall. You could leave them at idle until clearing the runway, but you never would want to go from high reverse to forward thrust because you would get what is called a "forward thrust bump." Basically a push forward - not good!  >:(

Lou