District IX—Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming
Jim Tiller
Vice President
jtiller@hotmail.com
Box 828, Custer SD 57730
Tel.: (605) 390-3878
Each year, the AMA holds a drawing to give a gift of $1,000 to a hobby shop that signs up new AMA members. This year’s award went to the Hobby Hut in Grand Junction, Colorado. This is the first time a District IX store has been selected. This store is in the class of the best stores anywhere in the US. Serving Western Colorado and Eastern Utah, the store is a bright spot for modelers from miles around.
I had the chance to deliver the check in person and meet Chris and Amy Nielsen, the owners. I must say, they are my kind of people and this store is my kind of place. Chris, Amy, and their son, Parker, have this place packed floor to ceiling with all kinds of great hobby stuff. It was a great pleasure for me to deliver this gift to the Nielsens.
The Grand Junction Modeleers have a real gem here. What a deserving place for the money to go. To my surprise and delight, a few moments after I handed the AMA check to Chris, he handed me back a check for $500 to go our District IX Scholarship fund to help send two young fliers to Camp AMA. Just goes to show what kind of people the Nielsens are.
I got to meet the Grand Junction Modeleers club in Colorado. I attended the regular club meeting and also put a couple of flights in at the club field.
The club field is also worthy of mention. Club members fly from a great county location that has plenty of space and a great facility. The 500-foot paved runway has little around it to curb any type of flying. The neighbors are a drag strip, a gun club, and a county law enforcement training facility.
This club of roughly 80 dynamic members is active in the community, hosts contests and events, and is a standard for what AMA is all about. Its latest venture is a sanctioned drone race set for this September.
The club secretary, Vicki Felmlee, was in attendance for our check presentation at Hobby Hut and shared a great story that exemplifies what they are all about.
The Mesa County 4-H Rocket Competition, one of the ribbon-awarding events at the Mesa County Fair, was going to hold its rocketry event in a residential parking lot. When the club found out, it offered its flying site and volunteered to help. The rest is history and the 4-H rocketry group has found a permanent home at the Grand Junction Modeleers’ flying field for this event.
What a great trip and thank you to Chris and everyone else who made my trip such a pleasure.
I attended the annual Sodbuster Auction in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. This is an annual trek for me. It is a laid-back event and the auction goes through a ton of items quite quickly. This year, 238 items went across the auction block to 88 buyers—all in roughly 5 hours.
One secret is modeler and auctioneer Ron Wyhre who has done the auctioneering for many years. The other is lots of cooperation from people such as Tim Mallatt, Jim Cero, and Rod Mullen. This event is very well organized in advance and goes off without a hitch—well, maybe one computer hitch that was quickly sorted by Jim Cero.
