The greatest thing that I remember about those Estes catalogs from the 1960's (well, besides the kits and motors
) was that you could get a pretty good intro to model rocketry by reading them - they were just packed with information. Even before the 1969 catalog, which had the whole handbook bound in it, there were plenty of great, informative articles included (as in, for example, the 1967 and '68 catalogs). The thing that attracted me to Estes Industries in those days was that Vern and company did not want to just
sell you model rocket supplies, they wanted very much to
teach you about rocketry. I remember that as even being a theme in their early advertisements. I was a kid who was really hungry for that kind of information, and when I saw one of those ads for the first time, well, they pretty much had me from there. My first catalog, in '67, and all of my mail orders during that period all delivered on that promise.
I had a real sense of that in all of my contacts with the company. There is a well-known picture of Vern showing a couple of boys (in a classroom, perhaps) something on a model rocket. It was printed in many of their catalogs at the time, and was in at least one of their magazine ads, as I recall. I cannot even begin to tell you what kind of impact that one photo had on me. It was things like that picture, and those catalogs, and the Model Rocket News, and the way that the company related to its customers, that really caused this man to become both a teacher and a hero to a certain young teenaged boy in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the late '60's. And you know, he still is. Stories like the one you just mentioned keep cementing that relationship, even after all these years.
Mark