HERE'S HOWE -- THE AIRPLANE'S SHADOW

HOW FAST IS IT GOING?

Sorry for being late.  I have to tell you a secret: I was working at a gainful project.  Can you imagine that?  It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, I have to drop a lot of things to make sure that the gain is full, or as full as possible, anyway.  The other part of the secret is that I was also busy composing responses to a person who had submitted three responses to one of our catechetical blogs entitled, "Catholic Q & A with Father Mike."  The comments came back, not as answers to our questions, but as challenges and more questions about our Catholic faith.  So naturally, since I am the Theology Editor of the magazine I had the joy and duty to respond to the person who composed the comments and for the enlightenment of those who would eventually read them.  Father Mike is a celebrity and he doesn't have time.  We 100 year old grunts are the warriors in these battles.  So now that you know more about my personal life than you ever wanted to know.  Let me tell you some more about it.  This is more autobiographical and light hearted than the first part.
When I was a boy, a younger boy than I am presently, EFR Dion would bring home the Sunday editions of two New York Newspapers every weekend.  No, not the Times.  I remember one as being the Mirror and I forget the other.  It was always interesting to read these papers because they had a wonderful line-up of cartoons.  Let me try to remember a few.  Henry (Carl Andersen); Terry and the Pirates (I've got the guy's name on the tip of my tongue...); Little Orphan Annie; The Katzenjammer Kids; Superman; Blondie; Dick Tracy; Nancy; Pogo and a couple more that I can't remember.  There was one about a caveman but I can't recall the title, and finally don't forget Joe Palooka.  It was a lot of fun reading these items.  There was also a semi-glossy magazine in one of the papers and outside of the pictures, I didn't pay too much attention to the content.  There was however one section that I learned to appreciate and never really missed.  It was so intellectually satisfying.  So much so that I have forgotten everything that I ever learned there except for two things.  Yup, all of two.  The first one was easy and I remember feeling that I knew the answer even before reading it, but rather than to try to answer it form my own resources, I read the answer anyway and got this reaction that we all know so well, "I knew that!"  The question? "If you wanted to always walk in the same direction around the earth, in which direction would you choose to walk?"  See, you know the answer to that and perhaps have known it for many years.
The second one is a little trickier and believe it or not, I really did not understand the answer as it was written in the newspaper.  Being a simple tyke of perhaps 10 or 11, I guess that my puzzlement would be understandable.  "Does and airplane's shadow travel at the same speed as the airplane?"  Now that, my friends was a mystery to me.  All the more so that the answer started of with, "It all depends..."  I think that it was then that the curtains came down over my brain and I lost it.  I tried to understand it but could not.  For some inexplicable reason, I never asked EFR Dion for an explanation.  I decided, out of a sense of pride?, that I would solve this one myself.
You know that it took longer than a day.  It took longer than a month.  It actually took years.  In order to protect the innocent, I won't say how many years. Here's how it happened.  I was in the car with EFR Dion and we were going to pick up MJT Dion, his Voice from the Kitchen.  She was coming out of the hospital with my second brother.  We were driving up to what we used to call "The perpendicular parking" space.  Nose to the building, rear to the sun.  There was our shadow on the building.  We were moving and it was not.  Wow, I thought I had it.  I had to test it.  I kept it to myself.  This was too good.  I tested and tested but was never satisfied with my experiences.  The profile of an automobile is too low to get good shadow extension, so the experimentation was taking a long time before bearing any solid fruit.  Then came time to go back to school.  That was to be the key of the latching on to the truth.  The high profile of the bus and the low sun early in the morning were a perfect lab for me to try out my senses.  For the fifteen minutes that I was on the bus, I marveled at the way the shadow would jump from one building to the next at the speed of light while bus was crawling along the street.  I had it.  It was, and still is,  all in the angle.  Ya know what?  That night EFR Dion got an earful!

BECAUSE I AM WRITING THIS, I AM NOT DOING THIS (SEE PICTURE)

To those for whom it is Jan. 1, Happy New Year.


To those for whom it is already Jan. 2, Carry On, and many more.


To those whose calendars are still awaiting the new year, don't feel too bad about being reminded twice in a short span of time that you are one year older.
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This is a picture of a simple rubber band motor powered model airplane.  It is constructed from simple plans which serve as the outline for balsa wood strips that form the skeleton of the aircraft.  You can see them clearly through the light tissue paper "skin" of this cleanly built model.
A model of this size could be purchased for $0.25 in the 1940's and early '50's.  Young people such as I was then would build one or two per week, and compare them with what their friends had done.  We would then go out and fly them until they were so thoroughly destroyed that we would beg our parents for another $0.50 for another model, glue and 1/8" rubber band.

THE ZERO -- NOT A SINGLE ONE LEFT -- I HEAR

THE STEARMAN -- STILL A DREAM IN A BOX

In fact, I still have two of them in the box, untouched.  One that I built numerous times in my youth, the famous Mitsubishi "Jap Zero" and one that I have only dreamt about, The Stearman Bi-Plane.  I pray that I will have the time to see these dreams through to reality.
Maybe I should make this a secondary New Year's day resolution...spend some time building model airplanes.  Hhhmmm... Just a thought.


I was about 10 when I built my first "flying model".  A picture of what it should have looked like is right here.

No, mine did not look like this!

The second one was a Stinson Avenger.  My father bought this one for me because it was the first model that he had built as a boy.  He used to tell the story about how well it flew.  He, and I, were hoping that I could duplicate his feat of many years before.  I did not succeed in making the finished product fly on its own.  It was quite a personal defeat for me.  Frankly, I suffered many a defeat in this area.  It wasn't until I had children of my own and taught them how to build "flying models" that we succeeded in building some winners.  But before then I built a "ton" of quasi winners and another, larger "ton" of losers.  Here are the numbers 2, 3, 4 in order.

Stinson Avenger

This one turned out looking a lot better than the P-47 Thunderbolt, but it too did not fly under its own power.  It was good at gliding, which the P-47 was not.  So there was a little progress in my life.

Piper Cub -- Excellent glider

This was a great glider but once again, even though it flew well from a hand launch, I was defeated in the effort to make it leave the ground on its own.  This was actually, as is pictured, the time when I learned to keep the wings separate from the fuselage and secure them with a rubber band, as is shown here.  It was the first "trick of the trade" that I learned.

Messerschmidt -- What a loser

Fokker D8 -- Another disaster

These two German war planes were disasters in two ways.  Although the Fokker D8 looked and performed better than the Messerschmidt, it was not very good, although I made it look good.  Secondly, all my friends really got all over me for not sticking to American war planes.  So, you know what that meant.  No more German for me.  I succeeded in getting praise from my friends for the following efforts, not necessarily in any order from this point on.

Grumman Hellcat, Spitfire, Corsair, P-51Mustang, Douglas Dauntless and once again I went German with the Stuka4 and finally, because the Zero was getting a lot of attention as being better than our American planes, we all went to building Zeros.  I confess that we related to the fact that the Zero was giving our boys huge headaches over the Pacific, they were also giving us children headaches too...As good as they were in reality, we couldn't make them fly any better than any of our models of domestic and British products.  Seriously, this meant something to us.  We could not figure out why these planes could be better than ours in reality and not be better in our own hands.  Think it over.  Maybe there is to this day something of that type of relativity in your own minds.  I know that whenever I hear a politician or talking head say that we have the best of anything in the world, I snicker because I know that it is erroneous to its core.  There might be one or two things, but 95 out of 100, it's wrong.

All during this time we were building the occasional Piper Cub, Aeronca, Curtiss Wright biplane and one guy even tried a Sopwith Camel.  Biplanes were too much of a challenge for us, so we shied away from them.  Note that it was not a time when we went to the hobby store and sought out "easy to fly" designs from engineers who were seeking the solution to the "guaranteed to fly" promise.  We were seeking to replicate the real world in miniature so that we could see it in our own back yards and live it in our own way.  


I grew older and the sport of baseball took my time away from the model airplane table.  I did not lose the desire to build better and better planes.  In fact, as I grew older I became better at the craft and did some pretty nice things with my children when they got to be 8 or 9 years old.  Together we built models that really flew very well.  We've gone beyond that now.  I live with the desire to realize my masterpieces.  There are some decisions that the Voice from the Kitchen and I have to bring to fruition before that.  I wonder if God will give me the time and the health to do it.  I hope he does because these two plans cost me $35.00 each.  In the old days (late 40's) they would have been $1.00.  I know because at that time my last model was a Grumman Hellcat of the same dimensions as these two and it cost me $1.00.  I finished it.  It looked swell, like we used to say, but because I did not have the savvy that I have now, I couldn't make it fly.  I guarantee that if I get a lick at the two I have in the box, they will fly.  Stay tuned.