Nats Congrats Dave Fitzgerald! - and a look back

[Terry Caron]

Congratulations to David Fitzgerald.
I thought a quick look "back when" might be fun.
MB Oct., 1975.
(I hope it's the same Dave!)      

[john e. holliday]

What happened to the winner is he still flying?

[Clint Ormosen]

What happened to the winner is he still flying?

Probably not. But I'll bet it keeps Dave up at night knowing that out there somewhere, probably in a remote part of the country, there's a guy that pick up a handle and beat him. 

[Tom_Fluker]

What happened to the winner is he still flying?

If I recall, Joe stopped flying around the time he went to college.  I think he went to Texas A&M.  I've found a Joe Musumeci through the Aggie Network and have a note out to see if he is the same.

[Brett Buck]

Probably not. But I'll bet it keeps Dave up at night knowing that out there somewhere, probably in a remote part of the country, there's a guy that pick up a handle and beat him. 

      He does still remember this because he mentioned it in the recent past. He doesn't like coming in second.

     Brett

[Ted Fancher]

It is worth noting that this was David's first Nats and he was flying that purple monokoted Banshee.  Also worth noting was that David beat Joe at least the next year and continued to win every Nats Junior and Senior event for which he was age eligible thereafter. 

He's done pretty well since turning "old", too!

No put down of "little Joe".  He was a protege of the late, great Bob Gieseke and was very competitive with Dave at each subsequent nats in which they both competed.  Together they made the Junior and Senior events very watchable.  It would, indeed, be great if Joe were to return to the fray.

Ted

p.s. I believe the above to be accurate...I do, however, plead old timers should there be flaws of facts.

[Ted Fancher]

Seeing the old pic of David and Joe made me nostalgic so I dug up one of my few physical memories of the guy I spent most of my happy youthful flying hours with; my late brother Gary.

In his one brush with stunt immortality at the 1959 AMA Nats at Los Alimitos NAS Gary posed with his blue with white trim Nobler-centered in the below picture taken by an AMA photographer which appeared on the cover of the Nats issue of the "then" Model Aviation magazine.  Gary and I spent many a happy day flying inside loops until the lines were pretty much bound up at local parks in the then quaint little town of Renton, Washington.  We took a train from Seattle down to Los Angeles where we were met by old family friends who shepherded us to the Nats and picked us up afterward.

My dad flew down in his Piper Apache afterward to pick us up along with what remained of our airplanes; my cobbled back together for the finals Ruffy (which had crashed during a test flight when the Fox .35's crankshaft broke and got spit out along with the prop and spinner in the middle of the overhead 8s as my--soon to be displaced by Billy Werwage--hero Bob Palmer awaited my landing so he could fly an important practice flight), my Dooling .29 powered Regal Raider proto-speed ship which topped out with a back in the pack 102MPH flight and a couple of Gary's combat wings.  Gary wrecked his Nobler IIRC and I had wrecked my 1/2A free flight Starduster that I thought would win the event (it had won our first and only previous free flight event back home so another win seemed predictable) but didn't survive its first ever VTO attempt on its first Nats test flight...preferring instead to level off at about 10' AGL and chase spectators until its demise.

The second picture (the Model Aviation's "Centerfold") of the then top of the line class D() speed engine, the McCoy .60 is included only as an indicator of inflation since 1959.

Ted