Club History

A short account of the history from Bill Bowen

The only other one besides GV and me is Bruce McDannold with his son Alex standing beside him.  Bruce is holding one side of the sign.  Monty Stratton, second from left, and Frank Hirsch on the far right have both passed.  
That is the day we started work on the field in Finley.  The runway was on top of an old Navy unimproved runway that the Navy used to train their pilots for landing on non-pavement surfaces.  If you flew over the field you would see two crossing runways where no weeds or sagebrush would grow because it was all rock with very little dirt.  It was an amazing picture.  Maybe GV still has a copy of it.
As I mentioned on Sunday, Frank Dunham who owned the Black Angus Restaurant had that 100 acres leased from BLM for grazing his cattle used for his restaurants meat.  He was friends with Marv Kinney, one of the Vista Field commissioners who liked us.  When we got kicked out of Vista Field Marv talked to Frank about sub-leasing a piece of his grazing property to us for a field.  That is how it all started.  We did have to repair the fence a few times when the cows wanted to eat on our side of the fence.  We also had to clean cow pies off the runway a few times.

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