President's first news...
SAM Nine Presidents First Letter....
(Webmaster Note....Date
Unknown probably Circa 2005)
Well,
Chapter 9 has just taken a sizable step toward
respectability! I must explain. Yesterday evening, John and
I were out driving around south of Shreveport. Now, we
hadn't intended to be just driving around, but the evening
had deteriorated to that point. Actually, we'd left my house
with two 1/2A Texaco planes, the flight box and starter bag,
with the intent of a quick trip up the street to a large
schoolyard for some “just plain flying”. No engine-testing,
no balance-point-adjusting or wing-shimming. Just an hour of
steering the airplanes around in the air.
When we got to the school, there was a lacrosse team
practicing smack dab in the middle of the field. Ok, well,
that's out. Next option was a huge vacant lot on the
four-lane highway near the southern edge of town, past the
LSU campus. (I know, not the best of ideas, but it was big
enough to not be too risky.) We got there only to find that
someone had decided to start building a nursing home in the
middle of that field. The bulldozers, giant piles of dirt
and other large metal objects effectively put an end to that
idea.
John said he'd been wanting to show me another possible site
he'd seen, a little farther south. So off we went. That
field was certainly huge, but unfortunately, someone had
felt that planting food, of all things, would be a better
use for it than model aircraft. Indeed!
What the heck, says I, let's just drive a little farther and
see what we can see. We came to a road running off to the
right, which John said he hadn't yet explored. About 0.8 mi.
down that road, which had been running through fields full
of waist deep grasses, a few small industrial-type
buildings, and the occasional house, we came upon a fire
station. It was one of the typical rural fire district
buildings, with one engine out front and a couple of cars
parked on the side. But,.......behind it was a large field.
Quite large, in fact, and covered with only knee-high wild
grasses. There were three or four trees way over on one
side, but with even more open fields beyond them, and no
houses anywhere. Hey, what could it hurt to ask the guys
inside if there'd be any chance of flying back there? I
pulled into the driveway and parked beside the two cars.
While I was deciding how I would verbally approach the folks
inside, a young guy in uniform came out of the door and
walked slowly over to my side of the van. This initial
conversation was destined to be short and sweet.
“Can I help y'all?”, he asked, in a very friendly tone.
“Well,” I started, “we were just wondering if it might be
possible for a couple of old farts to fly their small radio
controlled model aircraft over that field back there?”
He hesitated, looked over his shoulder at the field, and
said casually, “Sure. Any time they'd like to.”
I looked over at John with my mouth open! WHAT had he said?
Ok? Sure?
“Really?”, was all I could get out at first!
“Sure, in fact, we've got a couple of guys who've been
trying to teach themselves how to fly with some little
electric planes. Not doing too good at it yet, though.”, he
said.
At that point I managed to blurt out, “Well, you can tell
them that they just got some free flying lessons! Really, we
can fly anytime and it'll be alright?”
He laughed and said, “Sure, there's always one of us on duty
here, twelve hour shifts, always use somebody to talk to,
and the Captain lives right across the road over there, he
won't mind.”
The first thing I said to John when we were unloading the
planes and could talk privately, was that I was sure we'd
been killed in a car wreck and had died and gone to heaven!
After we'd pinched each other and verified that we were
still alive, we started looking more critically at the
field. In a word,....ideal! Even has parking space for eight
to ten, maybe more, cars, right at the edge of the field!
And the firefighter says that his Captain is big into public
relations with the community and welcomes letting people
visit, and even have birthday parties, etc at the firehouse!
Oh, and just to make it even better? Our firefighter/EMT
friend, says that even though about every two weeks, one of
the other guys comes out and bush-hogs the grass down to
ankle height, John has also been running a hand-pushed power
mower into it to cut a runway for the fledgling electric
flyers to use in their attempts. We told him that if he
wanted to be relieved of that duty, we'd be more than happy
to take on the chore for him!
So, SAM 9 now has a field to fly from! (on, over,
.....whatever.) More developments reported as they occur!
Patrick Leray.....