I was about ten when I discovered some older guys, probably teenagers or young college students, hurling OK Cub 14s into fifteen feet of brown, tannic-acid-tinted D'Arbonne Bayou water.
(Probably ought to stop reading now)
Dreaming of owning a gas model motor since age five, I sneaked through the sumac, hoping I might snag an errant toss. But they saw me and began hurling beer bottles at me, not Cub 14s. Jaxx, Dixie, and Falstaff, if my memory serves. I had no recourse but to R-U-N-N-O-F-T!
Later that night, I returned to the bridge, stripped, and entered the tepid ooze that was D'Arbonne. I had high hopes of diving to the depths and retrieving my prize from the Louisiana muck. The bayou was teeming with aquatic life, turtles, frogs, gars, nutrias, snakes....I really wanted a gas model motor! But, even pulling myself downward with the aid of Cypress knees, I couldn't get to the bottom...just too deep. On my last dive, head throbbing, I felt an object in the bole of a Cypress knee, and running my fingertips across it, my tactile senses ciphered, "OK".
(Hey, you had your warning...)
Next day, after a bath and cleaning up the motor, inspection revealed it was really well-used, but it was all there and the glow head was good. I ran the motor in our garage, door closed, of course. (Top Flite 8x6, Testor's "39") Curiously, I still heard clearly the frogs' symphony of the previous night, which continues to this day, some sixty years later.
I built a Guillow's Trixter on which I mounted my Cub 14...my dream was realized...I had a gas model airplane! From that humble beginning, I learned lift (or lack of), drag, power (or lack of) mechanics, electric circuits, First Aid, and tether cars. (Centrifugal force was lacking in this curriculum, and VGs were yet to be discovered, still buried deep in the primordial ooze of Oz, awaiting discovery by someone willing to swim in crocodile- infested waters, but, I digress...)
With left arm raised and eyes lowered, I proffer this treatise,
dale g