Flying for Fun
D. B. Mathews 909 N. Maize Rd., Townhouse 734, Wichita, KS 67212
INSPIRED, CHALLENGED, and CHAGRINED: Competitions may be like wars in that they stimulate technical advancements. The 1948 Nationals certainly motivated me to make some huge advances in what I wanted from Control Line (CL) models.
Choosing the Madman
After hours of studying ads for the new concept—light structure, large area, moderate power—and designs becoming available in kit form, I selected the Madman, Sr. by Yates/Burbank Manufacturing instead of the Go-Devil by Palmer/Burbank or the Super Zilch by Saftig/Berkeley. J. C. Yates' exhibition with the Stearman had more than a little to do with my decision, but no less significant was the Madman design's beauty. Ultimately I built several of those other designs and many dozens of others, and I just had more fun than normal people when doing it all.
I ordered a Madman, Sr. from Crescent Model Shopping, Los Angeles, for the princely sum of $10 plus $1 shipping and handling. In 1948 dollars that was an expensive kit, but it turned out to be worth every extra penny. This was quality from the word go—beautiful wood and die-cutting, excellent hardware and accessories, and what sticks in my memory even today were the formed leather fillets for the wing/fuselage joint!
Construction details
These fillets were strips of what must have been shoe leather, with rough surfaces on two sides to be glued to the joint and a smooth, concave surface for the outside. In that day and age, the best fillets we could come up with were multiple layers of nitrocellulose cement (Ambroid, etc.). There were no epoxies, microballoons, or much in the way of fillers of any kind except plastic wood, which shrunk at least 50% with all sorts of cracks in it when it set. I have never seen anything that worked so well before or since, and I have always wondered what exactly that material had been adapted from and why it wasn't available as an accessory item.
Even in the hands of a 16-year-old, the Madman turned out to be rather attractive and was certainly in marked contrast to the "brick on lines" type of models I'd been flying. There is no beating the sense of accomplishment one gets from creating a model airplane from a box of pieces; that was true then, and it's true now.
The Madman flew far better than I was capable of flying it. I think I crashed it on the third or fourth flight. Somehow that part of the memory seems to be gone. I wonder why.
Other builds and flying
In the following years I built and flew such diverse designs as a bunch of Super Duper Zilches from the Berkeley kits, then I cut the parts using the kit parts for outlines. There was also a Stunt Wagon by deBolt, an Over EZ by Casburn, Custom Cruisers by Sullentrop, and the Veco Indian series of CL models: the Brave, Warrior, Chief, Papoose, and Squaw. Some of those designs were pure fun and others were major disappointments, but all brought many delightful and fulfilling hours of building and flying. How fortunate all of us who were caught up in the modeling craze of the 1940s and 1950s were to have something to pour our energies into—particularly considering the directions those energies could have led us.
For fun I’ve selected some magazine ads for kits of the period I’ve been writing about. This led me to ask Joe Wagner—who was in the middle of most of the Southern California modeling activity in the time period—for an explanation of who Burbank Models was and why it seemed so short-lived. Following is Joe’s explanation.
Joe Wagner on Burbank Models
Some time in 1947, several members of the Lockheed Model Airplane Club decided to start up a model kit manufacturing enterprise. The main participants were Howard "Hi" Johnson, J. C. Yates, Bob Palmer, Joe Wagner, and Cedric Galloway. Other contributors were Henry Orwick and Bob Enright (who provided some of the start up capital).
The company was named Burbank simply because that's where they were. They produced four kits: the Madman, Jr. and Sr., and the Go-Devil, Jr. and Sr. The Johnsonbilt appellation that appears in the ads was Hi's way of attaining "equal billing" with the designers' names on the kit labels, because Hi had done practically all the kit engineering and tooling.
In 1948 Bob Palmer lost all the fingers of his right hand in a die-cutting accident. That put an end to Burbank Manufacturing's operations. Later Hi and Bob were enticed by Gilbert Henry to add their assets and talents (plus some cash money) to the then-new Henry Engineering Company—first called Heco, then after another earlier Heco outfit complained, changed to Veco. (That allowed the use of the company's oval logo to still be used with only minor changes to the artwork.)
Gil Henry treated his employees (poorly), and so we left. First Bob (back to Lockheed's model shop), then me (to Lockheed engineering), and then Hi.
After Hi left, Gil came across the street (Veco was then operating in part of Lockheed's huge old WWII cafeteria building) to hire me back. I accepted and that is why my name is on the Veco kits.
Hi felt especially wronged by the shabby treatment he suffered from Gil Henry. In 1952 he talked Ken Adams (formerly Bill Atwood's partner in making the Champion line of .60-sized engines) into backing him in a new model kit company: Kenhi product.
Kenhi began in direct competition with Veco's line of Control Line kits almost item by item—but provided more complete kits including bellcrank, hinges, and leadouts which were not included in Veco kits, and sold them at a lower wholesale price.
The idea was to drive Veco out of business, but the scheme failed. Kenhi's first line of Control Line kits didn't perform nearly as well as their Veco counterparts. For one thing they were significantly heavier and they cost more to manufacture than their wholesale selling price.
Therefore Ken Adams instructed Hi to redesign the whole Kenhi product line. Unfortunately, the revised Kenhi line sold even more poorly than the first. The Panther kits sold poorly, mostly because the low aspect ratio wing put the flaps way aft of the model's CG (center of gravity) so that in flight they competed with the elevators for longitudinal effect. Some guys glued the flaps solid to the wing and flew with elevators only. They told me it helped a lot.
Hi's Badger Free Flight and Buzzer'd RC (Radio Control) aroused no enthusiasm whatsoever and when I closed down Kenhi in the fall of 1955, almost all the Badger and Buzzer'd kits were still in inventory. Most were burned.
Legend has it that the Go-Devil was the first kitted design with flaps. Hopefully Joe's letter will clarify the strange mixture of personalities involved in these kit manufacturers—something that has confused me for a half century.
Final notes
If you have an interest in CL models of the early era, you would do well to subscribe to Stunt News, which is the 100-plus-page newsletter (magazine, really) of the Precision Aerobatics Model Pilots Association, or PAMPA. Contact PAMPA secretary Sharen Fancher at 158 Flying Cloud Isle, Foster City, CA 94404.
In going through these half-century-old magazines to find this month's material, I'm struck by a rather odd phenomenon; as 55 years have gone by, my hair has turned white and my magazines have turned yellow. I have no idea what that signifies.
MA
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
