My dad, tired of driving a truck and wanting to run his own business, decided to open a small auto parts house and garage back in 1965 when I was 11 years old. To improve his chances of success, he moved from Arlington, Texas, between Dallas and Ft. Worth, then the fastest growing city in Texas, back into the piney woods of northeast Texas, where he was from. Sounds like something I would have done.

Our first summer in Longview, my cousins from Garland, Texas, came for a week-long visit. Cousin Jimmy, a precocious 10-year-old then, brought along with him a gift from his mother to help occupy his mind and keep him out of trouble. The gift was a model airplane kit with a real gas, or “glow fuel” engine, and we started right away to assemble the thing.

The task was more work than we thought, but over three of four days of model building, football, swimming and general goofing around, we had gotten pretty close to completing the plane and seeing something we built actually fly. This was way before radio control, and the little plane was intended to be a “free flight” model, going up, up, up in a slow climbing arc, then when the fuel ran out, descending just as gently in a series of wide circling turns to a safe, yet uncontrolled, landing. That was the theory at least.

And to make the plane do what it needed to do, the final instructions in the plans went to great detail on how to trim the elevator “up” just a fraction, and the rudder “left” ever so gently, and how to balancei the plane extremely accurately, none of which a group of impatient adolescents were too likely to get correct. But we did give it our best shot and headed off to the most open area we knew of on the parking lot of our local public school.

We filled the little gas tank, connected a battery, and flipped the prop until the little engine screamed into life. We had never been so exited in our lives! Jimmy, who was the pilot and owner after all, held the little bird back and lined it up straight down the parking lot. Right behind him were his cousins and brothers, ready to see this little wonder soar into graceful flight. When he let it go, getting airborne did not take long.

Up, up it went, and our hearts went with it. Climbing, climbing, higher and higher, our bird was doing what it was supposed to do! More and more vertical it went, and then it became obvious, it was about to perform a special treat for us, one great loop like planes do on TV. It slowed at the top, went over on its back, then started down the back side of the loop as we watched spell bound in amazement.

And thn our group of little geniuses worked the mental math of the equation, calculating with our eagle eyes and clever minds the geometry of that circle, and the increasing speed of the plane, to determine whether or not the earth was in the way of it completing its beautiful arc. Mental calculators whizzed, the numbers were crunched, and we all knew it was mathematically too danged close to call. But the wait would not be long.

As if there were a little man inside yanking back on the elevator, the speeding plane started pulling out of its loop. Pulling up… up… a little more… the ground so very, very close. Then it soared up into the air, and at the top of its second climb the engine ran out of gas and the plane started its graceful glide back to Terra firma.

Well, that’s the movie version of what happened. What really happened was the most incredible crash we’d ever witnessed, with parts of model plane scattered over a startling amount of that parking lot, a parking lot I still smile at sometimes when I drive past it now 40 something years later.

Is there a connection to this story to anything in the business world, in the sign business world? You bet. See, for two years before the recession hit we were planning a major expansion of our business, actually two businesses across the street from each other. We built a building, bought another, invested a fortune in equipment, climbing up that arc, planning for an amazing ride. And then the recession hit, and very quickly the momentum slowed and the direction changed completely.

In January of 2009, we rolled over on our back and down the back side of the loop we went. “Pull up! Pull up! Wrong direction, too much speed! Losing money fast. Pull up! Pull up! Doing the math, figuring the arc, too danged close to call!

There is more to this story than I have time to tell, and the earth may yet be in the way of our loop, but I don’t believe so, not quite. I think the outcome of our business aerobatics may be better than the great loop of Jimmy’s little plane. The shadowi of our ship seems to have passed beneath us, and may, just may, be getting a bit smaller. Ask me a year from now and I will tell you.

I hope your sign business hasn’t had the ride ours has, and things are getting better in your neck of the woods. I will let you know how things work out here in Northeast Texas, here in the Trenches. But one thing’s for sure, it hasn’t been boring. Nope, it’s not been boring at all.