Just For the Fun of it
HE BUILDS PEANUTS. He takes them to contests and is as apt to win as anyone else. You need to have this information if you are to relate to George Meyer of Corpus Christi, TX. George is the "Little Toot" man. For our money Little Toot is the prettiest, niftiest home-built ever. When George first flew it, Little Toot was the sensation of the Experimental Aircraft Association. George never produced kits, but he sells plans. It is a measure of the wonder plane's longevity that plans which once cost $50 now cost twice that.
Just For the Fun of it
THOSE WHO FOLLOW foreign magazines know that for two generations the late Keith Hearn of Australia was a remarkable man. To quote a 1981 issue of Airborne magazine, his achievements received recognition "that lifted aeromodeling above any other hobby." Certainly no modeler, present or past, rates higher acclaim. Hearn was a glider pilot before WW II who later flew for the RAAF. As a boy he wanted a hobby shop, as so many of us did. After the war he began to cut balsa gliders for chain stores, using a jigsaw adapted from his mother's sewing machine. In 1945, with brothers Bruce and Jack, he founded Hearns' Hobbies. He built one of the first CL models Down Under, held several Speed records, and designed many innovative kits for both FF and CL.
Just for the Fun of It
ACCORDING TO THE PAPERS, Frank Perdue once hated chickens. Perdue is a feisty guy who pushes chickens on TV. There he is, throwing classy bachelor dinners (Cornish hens for four) and telling us to send back the other guys' blackened bones with a note saying, "Gentlemen, here are your bones." Did he eat their chicken? Ol' Frank would make a perfect modeler and a classic AMA activist. I, too, am in a fowl mood, I busted a crate. (No, not my oppressed Kadet.) Like those unfortunate airline takeoff mishaps, my crash was a textbook accident. Perhaps you've noticed that accidents involve a bare minimum of three contributing causes.
Just for the Fun of It
VIBES! Flying sometimes has mysterious extra dimensions. One may fly routinely for months, then (when least expected) everything resonates: the field, fliers, flying, clouds, trees, the air itself. If only the day would never end. Like projections on the wall, images of flight drift before closed eyes at night. To sleep is to lose it! Sunday began as a nothing day, hot and humid-but would turn cool and calm. To watch frequency pins instead of airplanes at the Sunday melee would be a downer. Other restless souls were stirring, it seems. By three o'clock, with Don Srull and Hurst Bowers, we felt the tug of Shangri-la, that never-never land in the rolling Maryland countryside. No planning governed what we tossed into the wagon.
Just for the Fun of It
SOMEDAY my Quarter Scale Vagabond may make me happy, but right now it is a kingsized pain. I keep adding little things. But, like Mount Everest, the project towers unchanging. Until you cover one of these things, you are still on the wrong side of the power curve. For a plain Jane, the Vagabond hides a complex personality. I have letters with piles of photos from active modelers who also own the real thing. No two are alike. Walt Mooney asks a mutual flying friend how Bill is coming with "his" Vagabond.
