Just for the Fun of It
SNOOPY SITS on his dog house. I sit inside mine. It has been a summer of discontent. Whoever said that cabin fever is a wintertime malaise must have been talking to the penguins. Cabin fever is a summertime torture. For two months the temperature bubbled in the 90s, and all along the eastern seaboard was a wet sauna. Fantasy and reality blur. Carl Goldberg was tugging on the back of my pants. We were standing on the high ground at Shangri-la. My Electric was fading in distant lift. Occasionally, a screwball foam 1/2A RC delta whizzed by like a berserk Concorde, piloted by the famed rubber-powered Scale flier, Allan Schanzle. Srull's Electric Sparky was whining faintly, speck-high behind us. Off to the side, a small group of Maxecuters were launching Rubber Scale jobs into dreamy circles. I said to Carl: I must get back to that narrow road behind us to land. Puzzled, he asked why not land it here on the grass. If I tip up, the shaft will bend, I responded. I am forever twisting that shaft like a Rubber model shaft, tweaking it this way and that to check tracking. Let me guide you, offered the great Goldberg. With that, he started to pull me backwards down the slope, while I positioned the circling crate, overhead now, to slide between trees and over cars at the end of the one-lane tarmac, walled 15 ft. away by woods. Dizzy, stumbling backwards, now and then digging in my heels, Carl kept pulling. One supposes that the spectacle of Goldberg facing north while pulling Winter facing south with a crate gliding overhead in circles, was a sublime vision of advanced technique.
Just for the Fun of It
DOCUMENTATION is a painful chore for folks who enter Scale events. I wonder if you share that view. In simpler days, I built a few hundred so-called Scale jobs, almost all rubber-powered. My research was limited to stumbling over some three-view that caught my fancy. Photos just stirred the juices. I did not bother with details or authentic markings. Many people have libraries of airplane books, drawings, articles, and photos. Documentation sounds dull. Some have a love for everything that ever flew, and the older the subject, the greater the fascination.
Just for the Fun of It
THE LATE John "Kingfish" Sadler was a man after my own heart. Lord knows when he really began with modeling, but by 1936 he had a thing about weathervane vertical tails. He clipped off anyone's big fin-with or without permission! Sadler's story unfolds like the Burma Shave signs which entertained motorists of the 30s. Like red mini-milestones, these signs were mounted in sequence at eye level along the roadside, each presenting a few words of an outrageous ditty that eventually added up to the boffo message.
Just for the Fun of It
MARTIN BUNN was a terrifying math professor in the George Patton mold. He read the Congressional Record. Students who passed deserved the Congressional Medal of Honor. All I got were Purple Hearts. Bunn never called on me; I was that far out of it. But he dubbed me the "Perfessor." He might begin by drawing a line on the end blackboard (having told us there was no such thing as a straight line-and there isn't), and then fill boards around two sides of the room with some incredible adventure in logical wizardry. As Bunn would say, "Let's assume a straight line."
Just for the Fun of It
ALICE IN WONDERLAND, the Mad Hatter, and the Queen of Hearts can't hold a candle to the mad characters that, on the last beautiful day of the year, swarmed like locusts on the Northern Virginia RC Club flying site. How many "last beautiful" days can there be? Last Saturday, at the 10 a.m. ending of the curfew, I was the only one in sight. Never fly alone. Who wants to fly alone? That's like mincing around an Eaglet every time you detach the booster. You'd probably step on the little critter.
