Okay, I'm not trying to hijack this thread, but the following story from an autobiography that I'm writing just seems to fit here. It is about a Veco Squaw...
I would like to relate a couple of modeling oriented stories about Dad. The first of these he didn’t know about until quite recently.
Around the time I was about 10 years old, I had learned to fly C/L pretty well, and considered myself pretty hot stuff among the neighborhood’s modelers. My Dad had a prized Veco Squaw that he loved to fly on weekends, and it hung proudly on the garage wall. There was an unspoken understanding that I was not to even touch this particular model.
One summer vacation day I was particularly bored, and with some prodding from one of my buddies, I took the Squaw down from its peg and headed for the local ball field. I was sure that I could fly it carefully a few times and then clean it up and re-hang it long before Dad got home from work. He’d never be any the wiser . . .
I ran out the lines and began fueling the gleaming yellow and green ship. The Madewell .49 blasted to life with only a flip or two (it was a glow conversion), and I was off and running to the handle. I signaled my helper -- who I’d sworn to secrecy -- to launch the ship and then watched in absolute horror as the model took off and climbed straight up, accepting no control inputs at all. In my hurry to get flying, I forgot to attach the lines to the model! My very short life passed before my much-too-young-to-die eyes.
I watched Dad’s pride and joy get smaller and smaller as it climbed higher and higher. This was bad - very bad. But, just then, it got much worse. The ship nosed over at about 500-foot altitude and came screaming down. From my vantage point it looked inevitable that it would impact on the busy road adjacent to the ball field. Bending an Edsel with a Squaw would be grounds for termination for sure. Heck, just bending the Squaw would be more than enough to insure that I’d eat standing up for a year!
Time has this neat thing that it does to your mind when something really devastating is about to happen. As if to truly let you savor your agony, it slows way down to allow a frame-by-frame examination of the impending catastrophe. I watched the Squaw closing in on the asphalt. It seemed to take minutes. I had plenty of time to ponder the many things that would happen to me later that evening, and even to weigh the relative merits of each type of punishment that I would soon be experiencing. Then, just before impact, the Squaw leveled out and headed towards a weed bed at the edge of the field. It hit at a pretty good rate of speed, but the weeds cushioned the crash. I ran to the ship still expecting the worst, but picked it up to find only a broken prop! Really. The ship had freeflighted for probably 30 seconds and came to rest at the edge of the road with just a busted Top Flite 10 X 6. I realized that I probably wasn’t going to die after all!
I replaced the prop with one that had approximately the same grain color, painstakingly wiped the burnt castor from ship, and ever so carefully re-hung it on the garage wall. I then lived in fear for the next week that some passing motorist had watched the whole thing and would report the affair to my father. Slowly I began to realize that I had gotten away with a big one. I finally told him this story only a few years ago. Fortunately, he was amused. - Bob Hunt