Just for the Fun of It
WHY IS IT ALWAYS a Monday morning at column time? I sit, hands folded behind my head, listening to voices. I don't lack material. But the voices whisper "Wakefield." I don't want to write about Wakefields any more than you expect to read about them, but the voices insist on sharing an experience. I see a Buzzard Bombshell and a hot summer afternoon when a flight can last forever. The man had handed me the box and said, "How about bringing it in?" It was low on the horizon, a dot several farm fields away. I never touched the stick after pointing its nose toward home. It kept coming, and coming, and coming. Over the cyclone fences of the adjacent ball field it came, over the goal posts where we were flying, right at us, looming larger and larger. A subliminal sonar (radar?) pinged 100 ft., 75 ft., 50 ft., 25 ft. Turn it! Which way (as if that mattered)? The decision was simply too much . . . The better `alf just shattered the reverie: "I don't hear that typewriter going."
Just for the Fun of It
QUESTION: What is the future of Radio Control? What lies beyond the proliferation of sticks, knobs, buttons, switches, and kookey levers? Only Arthur Rubenstein could manage such stuff, and he is gone. I am a player-piano man. You can't predict the future on the basis of present technology. Prophecy is a game of one-eyed jacks with jokers and wild cards. There was a Hollywood flick, just before the war, which depicted a future of imaginative machinery-but ended up with a huge cannon to shoot a man to the moon. Some prediction. Jules Verne had fictionalized the moon cannon a half-century before that.
Just for the Fun of It
IT IS, AS THEY SAY, a small world. One meets other modelers in the most unlikely places. I once bumped into Frank Heeb, a Nats FF Rubber winner that year, on the corner of 42nd St. and Fifth Ave. in New York City. Frank lived in the Midwest. I overtook Tom Mahon in a midday throng on Times Square. Tom then lived in Hawaii. I encountered Gordon Light, from Pennsylvania, now retired in Maine, working on a lower floor of a building where I roosted in downtown Washington, DC. I've just had a call from son Mike about a chat he had with a retired Air Force man on a plane in Texas. This chap has a Quadra-powered Krackerjac, my early 1960s .15 cabin model. (He is sending plans, but such big crates, alas, do me no good without the help of gung-ho guys.) And there is Sears McCorrison. Thirty years ago I met Sears over coffee on the New Jersey Turnpike. We both were plowing homeward from a Philly Nats.
Just for the Fun of It
FRIDAY MORNINGS are a lot better than Mondays, especially after an exhilarating evening's flying. I had modified my 2 1/2:1 Leisure LR50-powered model to a cabin configuration to make comparisons. Parasols have a minor drawback, especially if you use a high, pretty tail. You can understand why if you consider that Pattern jobs have a high forward profile to assist in knife-edge flight. When you put a parasol into a banked turn and then go hands-off, it tends to tighten in the turn and, if uncorrected, begins to go into a spiral dive. That requires opposite rudder (for two- and three-channel jobs that are supposed to have FF-like good gliding ability). The cabin configuration, in this case, reduces the need to use the rudder to stay hands-off once you are trimmed to circle in lift.
Just for the Fun of It
I'VE DISCOVERED that some guys don't fly when they see Bill Kaluf and your peerless scribe drive up. They say it's just too much fun watching. Ours is a Chinese Fire Drill in slow motion. That's at Fredericksburg, VA. These guys have a 560-ft. strip mowed twice a week. Overruns are hundreds of feet long. My own club's small site 33 miles west of Washington, DC separates the men from the boys. The Fredericksburg strip centers a lovely wide-open park, site of the Union artillery when Gen. Burnside of the glorious beard became a cropper when he threw pontoon bridges across the close-by Rappahanock and tried to take the Rebs, who coyly were massed behind a stone wall on top of a hill. When I take off to the east, I am distracted by a big house and rose garden off the end of the park, for it was there that George proposed to Martha.
