Jim Messer

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If you haven't read about the AMA Heritage Landmark Award, pressented to the STARS club, the secret has been let out of the bag - it's on page 13 of the April 2006 issue of Model Aviation. Go there and read it now.

The award was made in August 2005, and seven months later it was talked about in Model Aviation magazine. The disturbing thing to me, other than being about five months late, is the fact that Model Aviation chose to honor the award itself by posting a photo of it, rather than of the five individuals that made the award possible. Although photos of the five pioneering pilots were sent with the full article, MA chose to cut the article content in half, and disregard the pilot photos entirely.

The STARS club is one year older than AMA itself, and that fact alone is noteworthy. Maybe the fact that Don Koranda (then Executive Director of AMA) made the award along with Dave Mathewson, has something to do with the announcement delay.

If you are into Giant Scale, you can thank the five pioneers that are still living, as three have already passed away; shown in the attached photo in this order: Charlie Nellis, Bill Messer, Jim Messer, Bob Dunn, and Lou Eltscher.

I will post additional comments and photos as this post progresses. Your comments are welcome.

flicka5

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Jim, yes, having been there for the STARS/AMA presentation 8/05, I too was disappointed in the AMA magazine article event coverage for lack of proper photos to reinforce the good written event description. Since the 1970's giant scale model development evolved through the STARS fleet of Bristol Scouts, one would think that they the magazine would have had at least one image of the Bristols lined up and of course, an image of the original STARS members involved as you have attached in your posting above. We will have to make up for their lack of image coverage by posting a bunch here!

Jim Messer

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Thanks Bud for the support and posting of a great bunch of photos. It's water over the dam now, but AMA in my opinion pulled a boner on this one. Any future Heritage Landmark awards can be taken with a grain of salt if this is a precedent.

Perhaps this should be moved to the AMA forum. What do you think? How do you go about doing that? Does anybody know?

flicka5

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Jim, I think you have to ask the Administrator to move it to a different Forum(AMA). Understand another nice article on the STARS Heritage presentation is in May's RCReport mag. which I haven't received as of today, but heard about.

Jim Messer

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We'll just let it rest. I don't get RC Report, so when you get yours, I'd like to get a copy. Keep me posted. You can do that by regular E-mail. Thanks.