Gaw, you guys bring back memories. When I was 13 years old, I had run through about a 1000 balsa F-86-style gliders--with the lead pin in the nose. I decided to build one of those stick models--and did, laboring over it for days. My 3 year old brother, Bill, found it and crushed it. Not a good beginning for him and me--and I think I hated that kid for about two years because of it. Then, coming home from school one day, I saw an ambulance, red lights flashing, cops too, up the road in the poor folks village on the Fox River (Illinois). I went up there and saw responders trying to revive a kid, about 5 years old, who had fallen into the river and drowned. The kid's face was blue. I recall that. He was very dead.

Within a week or so I had a dream, a nightmare, of all that again, the lights, the people, the crying mother, the blue face. It was my brother's face in the dream. I got up, crying, went to his bed, hugged him, and slept there, changed.

Not long after, in my grandparents' attic, I found my uncle's old RC stuff (from the 40s!), including bits and pieces of a J-3 cub with red ballon-style wheels, cracked they were, so old, but still held air. I never knew that uncle well. He was in California working for McDonald-Douglass (this was in the 50s). When I asked grandma what he did, she said, "Keith's very excited about his work. He wrote to say he WISHED he could tell me what he's doing--but he can't for some reason."

Years later I found out uncle Keith had been working on the "space suit," pressurized, not unlike, maybe the same one, Chuck Yeager and other test pilots used for the first ventures into "space," with the X-1.

My middle name is Keith--and I hope to hell I got some of his genes. I'll bet he loved clouds as much as I. Too bad he never flew a Twist, hm?