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Tony was born in Lowell, Mass., September 17, 1920, and grew up
in Lewiston, Maine where the first signs of his addiction to
building and flying surfaced in his early teens.
His very first project was a Knight Twister followed by a Pou du
Ciel (Flying Flea). Unfortunately, neither project was
completed because the available $2.50 building fund ran out.
Not one to squander hard earned cash, Tony used the Flying Flea
wing ribs and rudder around which to design a primary glider.
It, more or less, broke ground in a couple of early flight
attempts. Fortunately, a hurricane did what Tony failed to do
... destroyed the glider.
In 1940, soon
after graduating from school, Tony enlisted in the U.S. Army Air
Corps and shipped out to Panama where he attended an Aircraft
Mechanics course and Weather Observer course, among other
intellectual pursuits. He discovered going to school was
easier than working. Tony obtained his Aviation Cadet
appointment while in Panama and was ultimately shipped to the
U.S. for cadet training. In Uvalde, Texas he was assigned
a crop duster pilot, an instructor who managed to solo Tony in
the PT-19 as scheduled. Training continued with Basic in
San Angelo and Advanced in Mission/McAllen, Texas ... in T-6's.
In 1943 he was duly commissioned a second lieutenant and
declared a pilot and sent to Randolph Field to learn how to
teach others to fly BT-13's. Then, it was back to San Angelo to
practice his newly acquired talents as a flight instructor.
After deciding that was a suicidal wartime occupation, Tony
volunteered for a secret mission ... glider training in CG4A's
with the avowed purpose of invading Germany and winning the war.
Luckily, he had too much flying time to waste and they put him
in the right seat of a C-47 to haul supplies all over England,
Belgium, France and Germany.
The postwar
years passed quickly and Tony found himself doing odd jobs like
operating a helicopter mechanic school in Biloxi and Wichita
Falls, training liaison pilots in San Marcos, Texas, the Command
and Staff School in Alabama, and studying Japanese at the
Foreign Service Institute in Washington. Then, much to his
surprise, he was shipped out to Japan ... not to South America
as he expected. In Japan in 1960, Tony started his first
to-be-completed homebuilt, an Emeraude, in a clothes closet
workshop. The Emeraude was finished in Texas six years later.
This project was followed closely by a Flaglor Scooter, A
Volksplane, a Turner T-40, another Emeraude, a Falco, and some
of the RV series homebuilts.
Tony's
philosophy was ... if you are going to write about
building homebuilts you had better be a builder yourself.
A somewhat better builder than a pilot, Tony, nevertheless,
blissfully opted to test fly each of his homebuilts.
Tony was a
life-long supporter of the EAA and has volunteered his services
since the early '50's in a number of capacities, each revolving
around the homebuilt activities of the EAA. Early in 1972,
he was asked to write three articles for SPORT AVIATION and for
nearly thirty years continued to write and share his
comprehensive knowledge. Tony's four books on homebuilding
practices have become classics and are eagerly sought by new
builders.
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