General control line discussion > How I got my start in the hobby

My Dad built em and I flew em.

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Peter Nevai:
What a long and strange trip it's been.

My dad was the one with the fascination of aviation. The hobby he  took up after getting established in the USA (we emigrated from Hungary after the Russians squashed the Hungarian revolution) was building at first plastic models. He was a photographer by trade so that explains my portrait with my dad's little plastic air cobra I am 10 years old in that photo back in 1965. We were living on the top floor of a 5 story walk up in Sunny Side Queens right on 48th street and Queens Blvd, so there was room to build plastic models and that's it. He had his model building and I had my turtles and fresh water fish.

In the summer of 1967 I was shipped off to boy scout camp out on Long Island. On one visit my dad brought up an Jetco Thermic Glider so it seemed he had moved up in model building, it is funny that I did not recall that he built that in the apartment, I mean it was a nice size apartment but that was a big glider and certainly would be noticed. Well turns out that not only did  he move up with his modeling my MoM and Dad moved up in accommodations. Seems they shipped me off to boy scout camp so they could look for and buy a house, which they did in Whitestone Queens. paid 18K for a 100 year old former farm house and spent the next two years fixing it up. (The house still stands today and recently sold for...... Ready?.... $1.2 million dollars!!!! Yup a two bedroom 1600 Sq foot house on a 100 X 75 lot)

Any way once the house was pretty much squared away and all of the home improvements were finished Dad had free time on his hands, We lost mom that year (1969) from a car accident. So I suppose dad needed to throw himself into something to heal the pain. He was reading model airplane magazines and found out that there was a park near by where they flew model airplanes. So one Saturday morning he took me and we went to visit the park. Turns out that it was Flushing Meadow park and it had two grass circles and two paved circles and there were dozens of people flying models. There were lines of people waiting their turn at one  of the circles. We spent the day there. Late in the afternoon when the park was thinning out My dad came across a busted up Smoothie model stuck in one of the trash cans. It was in two pieces, the nose separated from the fuse right at the front of the wing, the motor and the tank were removed but everything else was still there. So we took it hone and my dad fixed it. He glued the nose back on and reinforced the joint with some women's nylon stockings. It was ugly as hell but it was in one piece.

He bought a Fox 35 and a tank and we put it together. The next weekend we were back at the park early while the place was still pretty empty, but since neither of us had any clue how to fly it or that you should not use kite string even really heavy duty to attach to it, or anything about setting the neutral..... well it was a short UP and a hard down and that smoothie ended up in way more pieces than when we found it. So to make a long story short our next plane was a Goldberg Lil Satan. 049... My Dad and I took it to a local field where the grass was knee high or higher. He launched and I learned how to fly. When I crashed no damage was ever done because we covered it with that new fangled super monokote and the grass kept the model from ever actually making it to the ground. After that my dad built some awesome scale stuff as well as kits. But he could never fly as he just got too dizzy so I was the pilot. Eventually I started to build my own kits and here we are today.

Peter Nevai:

--- Quote from: Peter Nevai on June 12, 2020, 06:13:14 PM ---What a long and strange trip it's been.

My dad was the one with the fascination of aviation. The hobby he  took up after getting established in the USA (we emigrated from Hungary after the Russians squashed the Hungarian revolution) was building at first plastic models. He was a photographer by trade so that explains my portrait with my dad's little plastic air cobra I am 10 years old in that photo back in 1965. We were living on the top floor of a 5 story walk up in Sunny Side Queens right on 48th street and Queens Blvd, so there was room to build plastic models and that's it. He had his model building and I had my turtles and fresh water fish.

In the summer of 1967 I was shipped off to boy scout camp out on Long Island. On one visit my dad brought up an Jetco Thermic Glider so it seemed he had moved up in model building, it is funny that I did not recall that he built that in the apartment, I mean it was a nice size apartment but that was a big glider and certainly would be noticed. Well turns out that not only did  he move up with his modeling my MoM and Dad moved up in accommodations. Seems they shipped me off to boy scout camp so they could look for and buy a house, which they did in Whitestone Queens. paid 18K for a 100 year old former farm house and spent the next two years fixing it up. (The house still stands today and recently sold for...... Ready?.... $1.2 million dollars!!!! Yup a two bedroom 1600 Sq foot house on a 100 X 75 lot)

Any way once the house was pretty much squared away and all of the home improvements were finished Dad had free time on his hands, We lost mom that year (1969) from a car accident. So I suppose dad needed to throw himself into something to heal the pain. He was reading model airplane magazines and found out that there was a park near by where they flew model airplanes. So one Saturday morning he took me and we went to visit the park. Turns out that it was Flushing Meadow park and it had two grass circles and two paved circles and there were dozens of people flying models. There were lines of people waiting their turn at one  of the circles. We spent the day there. Late in the afternoon when the park was thinning out My dad came across a busted up Smoothie model stuck in one of the trash cans. It was in two pieces, the nose separated from the fuse right at the front of the wing, the motor and the tank were removed but everything else was still there. So we took it hone and my dad fixed it. He glued the nose back on and reinforced the joint with some women's nylon stockings. It was ugly as hell but it was in one piece.

He bought a Fox 35 and a tank and we put it together. The next weekend we were back at the park early while the place was still pretty empty, but since neither of us had any clue how to fly it or that you should not use kite string even really heavy duty to attach to it, or anything about setting the neutral..... well it was a short UP and a hard down and that smoothie ended up in way more pieces than when we found it. So to make a long story short our next plane was a Goldberg Lil Satan. 049... My Dad and I took it to a local field where the grass was knee high or higher. He launched and I learned how to fly. When I crashed no damage was ever done because we covered it with that new fangled super monokote and the grass kept the model from ever actually making it to the ground. After that my dad built some awesome scale stuff as well as kits. But he could never fly as he just got too dizzy so I was the pilot. Eventually I started to build my own kits and here we are today.

--- End quote ---

One of the models my Dad built but had never the ability to fly. He scaled up the dimensions from the Monogram Model kit. The markings were a take off on the model box scheme. No internet those days

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