Thanks, Andre, for your welcome and encouragement. I'm honored to be a part of this group. Also thanks to Fred Van Gorter, who pointed me to the Flying Lines web pages, with all the combat history collected there. I've got some reading to do! Anyway, to continue, I'll try to recall some of the people I knew and flew with.
Our club was the Ithaca Model Squadron, a pretty classy name (we thought) for what was in truth a pretty laid back bunch. There were about 30 guys, roughly half were Juniors. Most of us kids never went beyond fooling with 1/2-A's in our back yards. Good experience, though; if you could get a Cub .049 to start and run on Testor's 39, anything else was a piece of cake. How we beginners got stuck with that engine/fuel pairing is another story.
There were about a dozen serious contestors in the club, but I can only remember a few of the core. Seniors included the Mason brothers, Dick and Gary; Dave DeSantis; and Strether "Stretch" Smith. Our gurus, the big guns in Open, were Harold Porter, Al Smith and Charlie Phillips. I should also mention hobby shop owner Paul Patten, who never flew but came to meetings and as many contests as he could, and was really supportive in every respect. Charlie was the real ringleader; his energy and enthusiasm were boundless and contagious. At 36, he was the Patriarch (my, how things have changed!). He picked the contest itinerary, as he was most familiar with the neighboring clubs and could tell us where the best meets and competition would be found. We were rarely disappointed.
There was a hotbed of modellers in Northeastern Pennsylvania, so we'd hit four or five meets in that region. T-Square designer Dick Schwarzchild lived in Wilkes-Barre, so PA was T-square country. More on that later. There were some great modelers there: Schwarzchild was another "spark plug", whose drive and enthiusiasm was a big asset. Seniors I remember were Lee Lyons, Mike Haravitch and Bob Heminway. Open flyers included
Schwarzchild, when he wasn't acting as CD, Jesse Hopper and Wesley Levan. There were many others; I just can't remember their names. This is getting long, so I'll take a break here.