Bert Striegler may not technically be part of the “Greatest Generation.” He was very young when the Great Depression ended, and his military experience was during the Korean War, not World War II (although he recalls that “We thought it was World War III”), but the Brady native exemplifies the courage, resilience and ingenuity of those slightly older, so we’ll consider him an honorary member.

Striegler’s ancestors came from Denmark, where they had owned a small shoe factory, in the late 1850s, when turmoil in Europe made them seek “greener pastures” in Texas. They settled near Fredericksburg, where the family home still stands, but his parents moved to Brady before he was born in 1931. His father was a pilot and a flight instructor during WW2, who bought and sold used airplanes during the war, and Bert became a model airplane enthusiast at a very young age. When he was just eight years old, he bought his first Brown “E” miniature engine for $7.95 – a huge amount of money for a boy in those days. He and his father built a Model Craft Miss Tiny gas model from a kit (“My dad did most of the work,” he says), and put the Brown-E engine in it for a test flight at the old municipal airport in 1940. There were no remote-control airplanes at that time; most models had a pneumatic timer, and just flew free until the engine was turned off by the timer. The little airplane took off, circled briefly and headed east across the highway. On the other side of the highway, a girl with a bright smile advertised Wrigley’s Spearmint chewing gum on a billboard; the model airplane hit her gleaming white teeth and fell in pieces to the ground. Bert had trouble keeping the Brown “E” engine running, and ended up selling it to Lecester Moore, who owned a battery and generator shop in Brady, for $5.00 in 1943.

Despite the inauspicious start, Bert was hooked; for the rest of his life he has been a model airplane enthusiast, and for one ye ...

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