I grew up on a farm in Illinois, raising corn and hogs. Farming does not make a lot of money. When things break, we fixed them. I grew up with the peculiar notion that almost anything could be repaired, built, or restored, even if it was not worth the time and effort. But it could be done. And I could do it.
My three sons, Ted II, Chad, and Bradford, grew up in the era of the personal computer and computer games. When I showed little interest in their Atari and all the games, they asked why I liked to build model airplanes and fly them. (In other words, why not play a simulation where nothing breaks?) My answer: flying model airplanes is really a computer game “with consequences”. No reset. No starting over. A crash results in the need to repair or in many cases, building a new model. The logic never really appealed to them.
So when my father began to fly control line planes (U-Control) when I was six years old, it did not seem unreasonable that planes crashed and had to be repaired. And it was absolutely necessary to figure out how. Nobody was around to do the work except my father and me. He was so busy that I easily figured that we would not fly very often unless I learned to repair our planes myself. And that is how I got started in modeling. Radio control was a dream in those years—exotic, expensive, and difficult. I bought three radio control airplanes in a distress sale in my teenage years, but I was never able to get them to fly very well. Crashing once in awhile is one thing; crashing
I transitioned from control line flying to “air cushion vehicles”, now called hovercraft. Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines populated the dreams of kids in those days, at least those kids today we call nerds. And I fit that category to a tee. I built every kind of air cushion vehicle you can imagine from little