1963 - The Beginning

.Dennis: In early 1963 Ernie, my father, discovered the EAA through our local Chapter 77. He joined EAA in March and I joined in April. It was so exciting to meet every month with people who were building or dreaming of building their own plane. Some meetings were at Bishop Airport (Flint, Michigan) and some were at people's homes where they were building. Up to this time we had built and flown many models but the idea of building a REAL airplane was amazing. With 5 kids in the family and dad working as a cop, money for such extravagance was pretty thin. But, the people at these meetings were cops, factory workers, in short just like us and they were building planes.

We also travelled to other Chapters such as 13 & 213 in Detroit for their meetings. We looked at several projects for sale. They were either out of our budget (zero), to hard to fly (Knight Twister) or, to complicated for our experience (also zero). I don't remember how we ended up with the Fly Baby as a choice but the plans were being published in Sport Aviation because Pete Bowers had won the EAA design contest, so we had a good way to see how it was built. This was just a big model airplane which we knew how to build and you could build it as you had money. By the time it was done we spent about $1,700 and about 1,700 man hours over 2 1/2 years. It was just like building a big model airplane, especially with help on welding and such from so many chapter members.

In late 1963 we ordered the plans for $10 from Pete and the adventure began.

Ernie (Dad): Sometime in Feb. of 63 a fellow pilot and cop, Bill Dawson, and I were talking aviation and Bill mentioned that he belonged to the EAA (Experimental Aircraft Ass.) and that I should join it. So in March of 63 I went to the Chapter meeting held at Bishop airport and became a member of the Chapter and also EAA.
And so another chapter in my life began with Dennis in buiding an airplane.
As Dennis had stated earlier that we had ordered the Flybaby plans and after reading then over we decided what we would need. First of all we needed a table to build it on. So we bought the lumber for the supports, table and 2 sheets of 4 x 8 x 3/4 plywood. The table would be 4 feet by 16 feet set up in our rec room in the basement. The building began in January 1964 by laying out the fuselage on the plywood and then began the cutting of material.