When I was a kid of 10 or so we lived in Costa Mesa, it was around 1960 so there was still a lot of open space around us. I had a neighbor named Bob, he was my dads age (about 35) and Bob was the coolest old guy in the neighborhood, he had an RC airplane. The plane seemed big and had a glow motor on it. I have no idea what size it was or what brand it was, I just remember that it was about the coolest thing I had ever seen. Bob was also a ham and built all of the controls himself. The transmitter was built into one of those old cathedral top lunch boxes and the receiver was built with little tubes (yes, vacuum tubes) from an old hearing aid. It only had two channels, rudder and elevator, no throttle, it ran at a fixed speed. There was no such thing as proportional controls, it was all or nothing and he flew it by jittering the sticks which gave him a kind of quasi proportional control. There was a big open field at the end of our street and that was where he flew it, if we heard it we jumped on our bicycles to go watch.
I still remember being fascinated by that airplane. I still remember what it looked like inside. There were C batteries for the tube filaments and for the control solenoids, which seemed huge by the way, and there was a stripped Burgess 45 volt battery for the receivers plate supply. Right behind the motor was tin fuel tank, I don't remember how long it flew but it was magic to me. That airplane, every piece of it, and all of the controls were built by Bob. I have built a lot of planes but never to that extent, those days are long gone.
After bugging my dad for months he finally too me to hobby store in Anaheim and I got a Cox control line plane, it was sort of like an ARF since it was very easy to assemble and the wing was secured with rubber bands. So it wasn't as cool as Bobs but it was cool enough for me, I thought it was *****en. I don't think I could have ever become that enthusiastic about something from watching it on the internet, of course the internet didn't exist then.
No one builds airplanes like that anymore, they just buy RTF toy planes and that is why the hobby is going down in flames. A big part of the RC hobby, to me at least, is building your own airplanes.