I was born into the Golden Age of Aviation in 1926. By age 4 I understood that Charles Lindbergh had done a miraculous thing, flying alone across the Atlantic Ocean. During the 1930s one-eyed Wiley Post was famous for setting altitude and speed records while wearing a pressure helmet that looked like the top of a hot-water heater. Amelia Earhart flew alone across the north Atlantic, and her smile was seen on many newsreels.
Jimmy Doolittle flew fantastic speeds in seaplane biplanes. Howard Hughes built a super speedster and was hugged and kissed by movie stars after setting a boomer of a record. Smilin’ Jack was a famous comic-strip pilot who saved damsels in distress and brought bad guys to justice by performing astonishing flying feats. All were heroes!
As were many boys of the decade, I had my mind on model airplanes more than girls. The thrill of launching a black-and-yellow tissue-covered rubber-powered model of a Corben Baby Ace was enormous! Red-and-white Rearwin Speedsters and all-yellow Piper Cubs were even better. You learned something new or acquired a skill with each model. Success was not always easy; patience and persistence were among the valuable lessons.
By age 9 I had acquired a fairly serious addiction to balsa wood and glue.
By age 9 I had acquired a fairly serious addiction to balsa wood and glue. The habit stuck all through high school and two-and-a-half years in the Navy. By the time I entered college at Penn State, the habit was so severe that I had trouble bringing it under control, even during final-exam week.
What’s worse was that I was sharing a dormitory room with Warren “Bud” Yenney, whose lust for balsa and glue was almost equal to mine. Glider wings hung on all of the walls, bookcases were places to store fuselages, balsa and building boards stood tall in the corner, and the floor was often sprinkled with balsa shavings. We locked our door on “Cleaning Lady Day” to keep her from ruining our delightful mess.
Bud Yenney had the audacity to pursue almost any idea that came to him. He had heard of a man named Walter Good, who flew a Radio Control (RC) model before World War II. Bud telephoned Walt and asked for a chance to talk to him. In mid-February 1947 I was the passenger in Bud’s unreliable 1937 Ford that was pushing hard in a blinding snowstorm to go through the mountains out of State college to Silver Spring, Maryland.
Walt and his wife Joyce welcomed two semifrozen students to the warmth of their home and hearts. Steaks and apple pie were followed by furious RC talk well past Walt’s normal bedtime. Warm beds were followed by a nearly all-day session Saturday. This was the start of a long and wonderful friendship that has been one of the biggest joys of my mostly joyful life.
During the mid-1950s Walt patiently helped me figure out how to make his single-channel “three-tuber” then build his five-tube dual proportional control system. Walt called the system two-tone plus width, which soon became TTPW. California modelers were deep into “bang-bang” reed control, and they declared that TTPW meant “too tough to piddle with.”
I was what you might call “illiterate” in the field of electronics. Nevertheless, via telephone calls and treks to Walt and Joyce’s house, after two years of asking dumb questions about mysterious selenium diodes, etc., I got the thing working in the spring of 1957.
By the summer of 1959 I was a virtual hotrod with an original-design midwing model called the Pittsburgh Pointer. With it I could fly a pylon course upside-down and do Outside Loops and Cuban 8s that were smooth—free of the jerk-jerk-jerk often seen in reed-controlled models.
Californian Bob Dunham with his Smog Hog and Midwesterner Ed Kasmirski with his Orion had high-speed thumb-twitching skills, so they flew smoothly and accurately enough to win places on the US team to compete in the first Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) RC World Championships in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1960. I came within inches of being the third team member.
Team members were picked on the basis of points scored in regional contests, with the Nationals (Nats) as final input. In the east I was narrowly ahead of Harold (Hal) deBolt all during 1958 and the summer of 1959. At the Nats in Los Alamitos, California, my Pittsburgh Pointer rolled 10 inches outside the lime-lined landing circle and scratched off points that otherwise would have been awarded for a “greasy” landing.
Hal deBolt came in fourth and I came in fifth, so he was the third team member. Walt Good was to be the team manager. I regretted my failure at the time, but several years later I looked at it as a blessing.
The Spirit of Butts' Farm - TAM 5
Map of Flight
(From the STAR Web site at
http://tam.plannet21.com/)
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