| Author |
 Topic  |
|
|
flyeslhost
158 Posts |
 Posted - 12/09/2004 : 1:31:55 PM
|
By Fritz Bien
12/09/04 - I came to Massachusetts from California in Feb. 1971, with a big box of airplanes, including several slope soarers. Being into the hobby for all of my life, the first thing I did whenever coming to a new town . . . |
|
|
flyeslhost
158 Posts |
Posted - 12/09/2004 : 1:32:28 PM
|
By Fritz Bien
12/09/04 - I came to Massachusetts from California in Feb. 1971, with a big box of airplanes, including several slope soarers. Being into the hobby for all of my life, the first thing I did whenever coming to a new town was to check out the entire hobby shops in the area. I found Fisher R/C in the Yellow Pages, but didn't know it was in the basement of somebody's house. I was still driving a rental car, and I remember it was snowing, so tromping around in a residential neighborhood leaving footprints in the snow while asking about the location of a hobby shop didn’t look like a great idea. I drove back to the hotel, and called Fisher R/C the next Monday morning, in what I thought would be normal store hours (10:00AM). The woman on the line told me Bob was at work until 6:00PM told me the store hours and how to get there, and admonished me for not going in the Friday night before.
Once I found the hobby shop, I asked about slope sites and glider flying in New England. Bob Fish told me what to do with the gliders (get somebody to tow you up), and put me in touch with Dick Janssen, a published local expert on model sailplanes. (He designed a neat Galloping Ghost transmitter published in at the time the technical rag Grid Leaks). Dick and Bob were both Charles River Radio Controllers (CRRC) members so I joined. CRRC was flying at the Wayland High School where Bob said I could stretch out a high-start over the Wayland Swamp. He was able to sell me a high-start if I was willing to wait a couple of weeks for delivery. Since my box of airplanes hadn’t come from the West Coast yet, I waited.
When the high-start arrived, it was mud season in New England and the Wayland Swamp was –a swamp. Fortunately, in 1971 Massachusetts had contests in the area. There was the spring contest in Northern CT, local contests in Canton and Hadley, and the New England Championships in Orange. There were also 3 other contests in Connecticut, one within the ECSS circuit. The local contests were mainly attended by power flyers who tried their hand at gliding... This was the way I was able to launch my sailplanes without setting out a high-start over the Wayland swamp. We went to Cape Cod in the spring and also sloped out of Plymouth in 1971. The prizes usually consisted of the top 3 places splitting up the entrance fees. Stu Richmond, Bob and I had several nice dinners from all of our winnings. Stu flew a Graupner Amigo II, Bob flew a Glass-craft Phoebus, and I had my trusty Graupner Cirrus.
HISTORY OF THE CRRC SOAR-IN
In 1972, I talked Bob Fish into running a glider contest. Since I was putting most of my hard-earned money into the hobby, he agreed to run a club contest. That became the first CRRC Soar-In. Bob donated kits that had sat on his shelves for more than a year as prizes. The winners that day included Grant Cary, John Weigel, and I. We also tried to run a Frozen Finger soaring contest that winter, off the ice on Lake Cochichuate next to Bob’s house. For those who haven’t tried, stretching a hi-start on pond-ice is great fun. Unfortunately, it snowed the night before the contest and we couldn’t find the anchor points for the high-start on the day of the contest.
I became CRRC President in 1973, just after CRRC got permission to fly at Callahan State Park and built its then new field (1972). Being young and stupid, the guys talked me into running a bunch of contests at the "new field". Since I was railroaded to become president, I railroaded others to run contests. We ran Scale, 2 H-Ray Pylon events, a Fun-Fly and a glider contest. We had a rule at the time that Contest Directors were not allowed to fly in their own run contests. We thus split the duties so that we could fly in the contests that we were most interested in. Bob Fish and I each ran an H-Ray Pylon race, Al Spievack ran the Scale, Bob ran the Fun-Fly. Jim Peghiny ran our first Open CRRC Soar-In. Dick Janssen supplied the winches, one gas powered, and the other based on the Ford Long-shaft. This is the winch I have to this day. The motor has been changed twice, the frame 3 times, different switches, solenoids, and cables over the years, but the same winch. We called the contest a Soar-In to try to encourage people not interested in competition to still enter.
HOW THE CRRC SOAR-IN BECAME PART OF THE ESL
When I came to the East Coast, the big contests here in the east were Valley Forge, DCRC, Trumbull CT, and Elmira. They were in a group called the ECSS; (East Coast Soaring Society) which included clubs all of the way into Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. York and Lancaster started having contests in 1972, the same time as CRRC. These contests formed the nucleus of the old ECSS. Otto Heithecker was the reigning ECSS champion, and he came from the Greater Detroit Soaring and Hiking Society. In order to get year-end points people, like Ray Hayes, would travel from Indiana to compete with the locals. CRRC aspired to have the glamour of hosting a large ECSS contest also. This was particularly being pushed by Dick Janssen.
The group out in Chicago was pushing for a national soaring event and started having the “Soar-Nat’s”. Mark Smith from Los Angeles went to the event and cleaned everybody’s clock with his Windward and Windfree. By 1973, the big rivalry between the East and West was in full swing and talk was to have a unified soaring group. The ECSS merged with the West Coast and the Inter-Mountain clubs in about 1975 to form the National Soaring Society (NSS).
CRRC became a member of the NSS and as such, the Soar-In went onto the national calendar. East Coast contests were held in Brewster, Pine Bush, Binghamton and Elmira NY, Wyckoff and Lakehurst NJ, Wilmington and Dover DE, York, Lancaster, Reading, and Valley Forge PA, Trumbull CT, Manassas VA, and Pittsfield and Framingham MA. A classic line written by Neil Liptak in Flying Models about that era was “How do you tell your secretary on Monday morning that you just spent 12 hours in a car coming back from a toy airplane contest?”
The NSS sort of faded away with infighting between the East and the West. The East Coast group formed the ESL, to which CRRC was a de facto member from its NSS membership. The first years of ESL we had contests in Pine Bush NY, Syosset, NY, Pittsfield MA, and CRRC at Callahan Field in Framingham, 2 contests in New Jersey, a contest in Valley Forge and Daniel Boone, one in York, and furthest south we had one at DCRC at Manassas. We had an annual awards dinner on Saturday night after the WRAM Show in White Plains NY.
-Fritz
Image Insert:DBSF 1978
92.6 KB |
 |
|
| |
Topic |
|
|
|
Blast from the past
Forum Locked
