My story goes back about 40 years and then some.

My father and my uncle (mom's brother) flew CL together as kids in the school yard.

In the early 80's, my father thought I'd enjoy flying as well. A CG control line kit, a Cox Black widow and trips to Buder Park in St. Louis are some early memories. I remember watching the combat flyers rip up the sky and the speed guys spin themselves dizzy. It was simply awesome.

A few years later, my family ended up in the Memphis TN area. I was blessed to live a block from the local school yard and local RC field as well. Our local hobby shop was incredible as well. My father and I flew in the club and I had awesome mentors to learn from. During that time, I flew FF, CL and RC. Engineers from Champion and mechanics from Jaguar taught me about engines. IMO, one of the best model designers began teaching me airplane design at 12 years old. I also had the opportunity to learn to fly CL again from Dee Rice (Oriental and Pinto designer).

From 12 or 13 on, I scratch built everything I flew and designed most everything I built as well. During that time, I designed everything from fun fly airplanes to RC speed airplanes and just had a blast doing it. RC Pylon was a big part of my life at that time as well. Like happens for many of us however, cars and girls got in the way - the positive of that is that I actually still have the car and the girl. In university, I started an aeronautical engineering degree, but finished with a business degree. Today, I use everything I learned in school (both the engineering and business)- In my career, at times I'm an engineer, at times I'm something else.

In the late 90's, I started flying again. Yet again, CL, RC and FF. This time, I took designing even more seriously. I had studied drafting when I was younger, and then I elected to teach myself CAD as well to help with all this new laser cutting stuff that became available. Again, I designed everything I built, but I was now cranking out something new at an extremely high pace. I was lucky enough to get pics of some of my designs in a few magazines at different events and as part of other things, and that led to selling kits out of my garage and eventually selling designs to a few manufacturers. Eventually my kids got to the point of needing my attention much more than flying did and once again the building board was empty. Shortly after this time, my wife and I moved us a few towns over - When I cleaned out the attic, I threw out 50 complete airframes, sold another 30-40 and gave away as many. In 10 years, I had designed/built over 250 airframes.

My son is now in middle school. He is taking a 'career' development class. He wrote a paper about his future and stated he wanted to be an 'engineer like his dad'. Around the same time, he mentioned to me he wanted to try flying a model airplane. It was time to get him in the shop and an opportunity to try flying with me.

I built a pair of Baby Ringmaster's for the two of us to fly for the October Fly-A-Thon. Truth be told, they were too hot and twitchy for my son, but he got his first few flights in on it. He'll have fun with his later.

I've got CAD cranked up and several designs that I never built or never finished opened back up with the hope of building a few of them.

Sure seems like it! Good to hear from you again Jeff!