Brady’s supermodeler

By JOHN HALLOWELL

       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 year even attended Parks Air College in St. Louis in hopes of becoming an aeronautical engineer.

       In the meantime, while attending Brady High School, he met a beautiful girl of Swedish descent, named Beverly Engdahl. She attended high school in the neighboring town of Rochelle; they were married after his return from St. Louis in 1951. 

       With things looking worse and worse in Korea the previous year, Bert had already enlisted in the Air Force. While he trained at Lackland Air Force Base, Beverly got a job working for a lawyer in San Antonio. Bert was sent overseas in 1952, but he never did get to Korea. He ended up working as a weatherman for fourteen months in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where the USAF flew B-29 bombers high over the Mideast, testing atmospheric conditions. (He learned years later that they also were checking for traces of radioactivity near the border of the Soviet Union, hoping for clues to progress of the nuclear program in the USSR.) Cold War tensions were high, and when a Russian reconnaissance plane flew over the base (every Thursday at 10 a.m.), air-raid sirens would be sounded.

       Returning to Texas in 1955, Striegler attended Trinity University on the G.I. Bill, earning a degree in business management and advertising. He got a job with Conoco in 1956 and was trained in Houston as a field Product Engineer. On June 27, 1959, Bert and Beverly were blessed with a brand new baby girl, Michele. The Striegler family's next stop was at Casper, Wyoming where Bert was assigned as a field engineer. He was sent to do a “lube survey” at a large Pacific Power and Light electric plant in Glenrock, Wyoming, near Casper  While working with plant operators to let them know what oil to use where, he noticed a problem with the emergency standby generator just in time to avert a major disaster. “That really launched my career,” he recalls. He later returned to Houston to work in Aviation Sales and was eventually promoted to Manager of Technical Services, in charge of product development and  product quality control, supervising more than 30 field engineers. During his Conoco career, Bert worked in Houston Texas, Ponca City Oklahoma, Casper Wyoming, Albuquerque New Mexico, and eventually back in Houston. He retired in 1990 after 33 years of service with Conoco.

       The whole time, Striegler was very much involved with his hobby of model airplanes and engines. He collected miniature internal combustion engines and met people with similar interests all over the world. One of the approximately 641 engines (from 32 different countries) he has today is a German design called a “Kratmo” used by Hitler Youth groups in the 1930s. During the Cold War, he swapped engines and parts through the mail with several East European and Russian collectors.  Another of his prize possessions is a Russian diesel built during World War II. Others include a replica of “The Elf,” which the 1936 edition of Ripley’s Believe-it-or-Not described as the “smallest internal-combustion engine ever built”. It’s nowhere near the smallest now. Striegler recalls meeting an English engine builder named Derek Giles, who wore his tiny engine as a tie clip. It had a displacement of .1cc, or .006 cubic inches, but it started right up when Giles filled its tank through a hypodermic needle! Giles kindly sent Striegler one of the little engines for his collection.

       Although all of Striegler’s engines are working models, and could be used to power a model airplane, boat or other vehicle, most of them are what Striegler calls “bench babies,” built and collected for their own special traits. (For example, one of his glass cases contains only diesel engines.) Striegler recalls the challenges of fashioning parts for the tiny engines; “We used Aunt Jemima syrup caps for fuel tanks” in one model. “They worked quite well.” He fears that the internal combustion engines are a dying art, since these days electric motors are taking over.

       Through the years, Striegler has been very much involved with the Academy of Model Aeronautics in Muncie, Indiana, and he is one of the original founders of the “Motor Boys,” an elite group of roughly a dozen enthusiasts from the U.S., England and Australia. He has designed kits for large balsa-wood gliders and remote-control airplanes, he has built about sixteen engines from scratch in his backyard machine shop, and has written articles on model airplanes for several magazines.

       One of his most successful designs was a simple little biplane (with about a two-foot wingspan) called the “Ebenezer,” which could be put together by hobbyists, young or old, in just a few hours from flat sheets of balsa wood. The Ebenezer was published in the April, 1958 Aeromodeller Magazine. It caught on especially well in Great Britain, where as many as 250 at a time have been flown at the “model aircraft flying weekends” at the Old Warden Aerodrome in Bedfordshire, England. The big Ebenezer mass launch is still held annually at Old Warden. The little aircraft design is now celebrating its 50^th anniversary and it is still flying!

       Another of his designs was a large remote-control glider called the Gulf Coaster, with a 108” wingspan. Launched with a bungee-cord device, it could climb to an altitude of several hundred feet, cast off the launch line and glide for a long time, depending on the skill of the pilot. Striegler’s longest duration flight with the Gulf Coaster was an hour and twenty minutes; “You’ve got to watch carefully, and learn to find the thermals,” he explains. About 1,500 Gulf Coaster kits were sold all over the world. Striegler published several other model aircraft designs, such as the Boomer Glider in 1977, an enlarged remote controlled Ebenezer in 1999, the Sperry Messenger scale model in 1968 and a tiny little remote control biplane called the Pumpkin Seed in 1963. A foam version of an Ebenezer remote controlled model was recently published by Striegler in the Model Flyer magazine in England in 2008

      On a visit to his parents’ home in Brady, Texas in 1989, Striegler learned that his old friend (shop-keeper Lecester Moore) was terminally ill, and went to visit. Moore had closed his shop years earlier, but the building sat much as he had left it, and Moore was determined to return the old Brown “E” engine. He directed Striegler to a ledge between two rafters at the top of the east wall, where the engine sat, covered with a thick layer of dust. It was the final gift from a dear old friend and mentor. Moore died a few days later. After a good cleaning and tune-up, the engine ran better than it had when it was new some 65 years ago. 65 years of experience made the difference.

       When Bert retired in 1990, the couple returned to Brady. They had a nice home in town, but Bert had promised Beverly’s father that he would come back and live at their family ranch in East Sweden, so they planned and built a new home there just five years later. By then, they were established citizens of Brady, and Bert had been elected president of the town’s historical museum in the old county jail. When they moved out to the ranch (just a few miles east of Brady), he set out to restore all his father-in-law’s elaborate rock work – the old house, barn, water tank and fencing. He then put together a machine shop in the old barn, continuing his engine hobby from the new “headquarters.”

       In 2006, Striegler heard that the last standing WW II building at Brady’s Curtis Air Field was going to be torn down. It was an important historic site, which he remembered from his teen-age years in Brady, when 10,000 WW II pilots were trained there. The building was officially named “Stage House – Parachute Dept” but a control tower had been built on top of it to supervise air traffic at the flight school, and all the pilots entered the building before taking their turns flying. Striegler and his wife, Beverly, along with many museum volunteers, arranged for the building to be moved to a lot behind the Heart of Texas Historical Museum in Brady, where it was restored, along with guard shacks from Curtis Field and the P.O.W. camp, which had housed 3,000 German and Italian prisoners in Brady during the war. An exact replica of the old control tower was built atop the old building, and an old sea-going storage container on the site was decorated with a mural depicting the Vultee Valiant BT-13 training aircraft, which was used at Curtis Field. It took two years of hard work, but the end result was a very impressive World War II Memorial, now officially known as the Striegler Military Complex.

       The Complex was dedicated in a solemn ceremony on Veterans Day, 2007, with a clergyman reading the names of twenty-one airmen who died here during training, and various dignitaries recalling the sacrifices of those who went on to fight in the Pacific and European theaters. Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo sent their Rifle squad to perform a 21-gun salute, and their Flag squad to officially present the colors, dedicated to the 21 men that died here in training, and to the 3,500 of the 10,000 who trained at Curtis Field that died fighting overseas. The Brady Clergy Association declared this site is now designated as Hallowed Ground. Freedom is not free.

       The complex is used as an educational tool as well as a memorial. Hundreds of area students have learned a little about Brady’s contribution to the war effort, and many World War II veterans have come to reminisce at the restored building. For the rest of us, the whole museum is a fascinating and enlightening look at the history of a town that has played an important part in American history.

       Striegler has two bits of wisdom to share. First, he says, “I never met anyone I couldn’t learn something from.” And, “You get things done by starting them.” His many accomplishments bear witness to the truth of those mottoes.

       So even if Bert Striegler is not technically a part of the generation that overcame the Great Depression and won World War II, he has definitely earned a place of honor with them. His ingenuity and dedication have enriched the Texas Hill Country, and we are proud to recognize him here.     

By John Hallowell

John Hallowell is the past editor of several Hill Country publications. He has been exploring the Texas Hill Country for almost 20 years.