NAR 60 Year Reunion, Part 2 - An Old Rocket Buddy

I'm going to start this reunion series on a more personal note.

This is a picture of myself and one of my best friends who happened to travel out here from Virginia to attend the reunion - Mr. Marc Kramer.

 

(Special thanks to George Gassaway for taking the time out to shoot the above photo.)

Marc and I go back to 1968 in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  He is actually the guy that got me into model rocketry.  In August of 1969 Marc invited me to go along with he and his dad to a model rocket event happening at the United States Air Force Academy. Marc was celebrating his 11th birthday, and a trip to this meet was one of his birthday gifts from his folks.

Turned out the event was NARAM - 11 !

We spent the entire afternoon there watching competition models and sport birds being launched into the blue Colorado Sky. 
Needless to say, I was hooked.

I didn't really get started into the hobby until 1973, so in the intervening four years, I was content with watching Marc fly his models.

Marc lived in the house right across the street from mine, so we pretty much hung out on a daily basis throughout our junior high and high school years.

I remember many evenings and weekends spent in Marc's basement workshop building model rockets and plotting about how we would soon become Masters of the Universe in parachute duration competition.

OK, we were both total nerds.....

Marc and I were both charter members of the Rocky Mountain Association of Rocketry in Colorado Springs (NAR section 331) in 1973, and spent many a Sunday morning over the following years flying rockets in the club's sport and contest meets.

Incidentally, Marc is the guy who introduced me to the first rocket of my fleet, an Estes Mini-Brute Hornet that was already built and on display at 'Custom Hobbies' hobby store in Colorado Springs. He suggested I buy the model to get my feet wet with rocket flying before I built one.
This Hornet is the very same model that I recently restored and is now my BAR-era fleet flagship. All of you who have been following this blog are quite familiar with this bird by now.

In the late 1970s, Marc and I went our own ways to pursue our various education and career endeavors.  We were out of touch for all of the intervening decades until Marc found this blog last year and established contact.  

Our meeting up here in Pueblo at the NAR reunion was first time we've seen each other in nearly 40 years!

And we're both still nerds!  But these days, of course, nerds are cool (at least according to the Internet).

So, here is an interesting aside that Marc brought to my attention...

This is the photo from the front cover of the October 1969 issue of Model Rocketry Magazine which carried coverage of NARAM-11.  The photo shows Mr. Doug Malewicki launching his R/C glider.

I would like to direct your attention to the two young lads in the near background observing the launch.

After much study and discussion, Marc and I are convinced that those two young men in the photo are us.  I was 13 and he was 11.  Our relative sizes, hair color and clothing 'styles' are dead on as well.

Nice to think that us two old buddies might be immortalized on the cover of MRm !

Cheers!










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