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Old 08-25-2013, 06:28 AM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
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Indeed. Yes, Bend, Oregon and Penrose, Colorado were both mysterious places to me at that tender age, because I knew of no other products that were made in them. In my child's imagination, I pictured them as being perhaps slightly "Willy Wonka-esque" company towns, which existed for no other purpose--although I could *never* envision Vern Estes dressed the way Gene Wilder was in the 1971 movie... :-) Also:

In addition to their gliders and rubber-powered model airplanes, I once had one of North Pacific's odd "Whirl-E-Bird" adjustable boomerangs (see: http://www.flight-toys.com/boomeran...table/tb53.html ); it consisted of two flat, constant-chord hardwood wings (which were stained or painted yellow), which had beveled leading and trailing edges to create the airfoil shape. One wing had a red plastic sleeve clip cemented to one end, through which the other wing could be slid (it was a tight friction-fit) to adjust the boomerang's flight characteristics. Well:

It flew okay, but unlike the Wham-O traditional Australian style red plastic boomerang that I also had (the new reproductions of it are much lighter and don't fly as well), the "Whirl-E-Bird" never came all the way back to me, no matter how much I adjusted it. One day, when I was flying it in a hilltop cemetary a few hundred feet from our house near Young Harris, Georgia, it flew in front of the Sun and I lost track of it. As I was walking around the graveyard looking for it (I had noticed a fresh open grave), a funeral procession drove up! I got some strange looks as I kept walking around between the tombstones, looking back and forth along the ground. After covering a grid pattern over the whole hilltop, I finally gave up, knowing it must have landed in a nearby thicket, which I wasn't about to look in because it was just the kind of place where venomous snakes would hang around...
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