Dan, you were already famous. 
That came after I had solved the Mystery of the Missing Flying Models Issue. Also along the way. I was on the local TV news once for a story that led off the 10 o'clock on Easter Sunday in 1998. On April 4, 1998, and tow of barges struck a piling of the Eads Bridge, and several barges collided with The SS Admiral River Boat that was moored on the river front under the Arch at that time. The boat no longer went on excursions and was just a sort of entertainment venue or casino. It broke free of it's bow line and swung around pointing down river. Being spring time, the river was up and swift and it was in danger of breaking loose. Another tug boat came to the rescue and secured itself to the bow. Fire Department boats off loaded the people on board. It was in the news for several days , when it became known there were no life preservers or life jackets on board in case of such an emergency! It got on the local talk radio station, KMO' 50,000 red hot watts, and the morning personality kept going on about the lack of life preservers. I finally called in to a recorded line really early one morning on my way home from work, and told him there were no life preservers on board, because they were all in my garage!! All the life preservers were solid balsa planks, 2" by 12" by 36" and I found them in the bargain box section of the newspaper about 10 years before, when they were doing a renovation of the boat. Six Flags was involved, money was spent , costs over ran, contracts got canceled and lawsuits started flying. When the dust settled, the main contractor won and was awarded anything off the boat he wanted and that included the balsa life preservers, some life jackets and anything else that wasn't nailed down that might be of collector value. I got all of the balsa that he had on hand, but not the entirety of inventory, and I still had to find a place to put 640 some odd of them!!! That's a whole 'nother story in itself! I got a call from the radio guy's producer about 8am ( I didn't get to bed until 4am that night) and explained myself a bit and then said they would call back after the 10AM news and interview me. They called and I told them my story and they seemed satisfied I was telling the truth, and I thought that would be the end of it. It was still the talk of the town for another week or more, when the radio guy was talking to a lady who was local TV station reporter at a hot dog stand, and he told her the story. I got a call from her on the Thursday before Easter asking if they could come to my house and do an interview about it, and naturally I said "Sure!" Easter Sunday dawned a really nice day, and they were on time getting to my house at 1pm. Everyone on the street was standing on their front lawns wondering why the TV crew was there and who I may have murdered or something!! They wired me for sound, and we just walked around my garage, they asked questions and I answered them. I had a SIG Magnum in my paint stand and some other models hanging on the wall so they could see what I did with them. I demonstrated how I cut them upon my band saw, and ran them over my power planer, and then showed them where I had the balance of them stashed in my attic. I had been selling them off a few at a time now and then. I cut a bunch of them up that had rot on parts of them into useable blocks and Jim and Todd Lee have used some of the wood in some of their airplanes. The next thing I knew, three hours had passed!! The reporter was a very sweet lady and had a good talk with my wife and kids, told me she would be calling me later once they got things edited and when it would be on that night. I called everyone I knew with a VCR to set their machines!! I had three in my house at the time, had my wife man the one in the living room, and I manned the two I had downstairs. The reporter called me about 9:30pm and told me the story would be on after the weather report and just before the sports report, where they usually stick the human interest stories and they generally last about 20 to 30 seconds!! Well, 10 PM came around and they started with a quick look at the world news headlines, then the national news headlines, and then they cut to a live shot of the Admiral sitting in it's birth on the river front and reviewed what had happened a few weeks before , and after they mentioned the question of why no life preservers, they said" You might be surprised to know where they are now!" I hit the record buttons and yelled for my wife to start the upstairs machine as soon as I saw the live picture. The story went on for almost 4 minutes!!! Three hours of video tape recording my interview and they had it cut to 4 minutes, but the fact that I led off the entire news broadcast shows you how slow a news day Easter Sunday can be and one reason why they wanted to do the interview!! It had some good shots of me sawing, planeing the wood, climbing into the attic and of my then brand new Magnum in the paint stand! All in all a neat experience. I have kept the tapes and digitized the story when I was doing the Walt Brownell tapes so it's easy for me to relive another few minutes of my 15 minutes of fame!! I even got to tell Bob Hunt a little about it in a spot on one of his videos about the 9th VSC contest while talking about my Yates Dragon that was built with the 1930's vintage wood and painted with WW-2 surplus Navy dope!! I crashed that airplane at SIG one year and I miss it a lot!! I need to do another one soon, built with the same wood and painted with the same dope!
Type at you later,
Dan McEntee
PS to add, If you find this video on YouTube, there is another where I fly my Cox 195 Super Cub, and yet another where I fly and talk about the late, great Mike Gretz built Fierce Arrow that I own.
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