Somerset Model Airplane Club was formed in 1981 and was known as The Somerset Balsa Busters. A small group of modelers met in a hanger at the Somerset Airport and organized the club. It wasn’t what you would call an official club at first, it was just a bunch of would be flyers getting together to find a place to fly. At the time of this meeting none of us could fly a model. A few of us were private pilots and were very confident that we wouldn’t need any training, instruction or anything of that sort. We could fly and it was almost beneath us to even suggest that we couldn’t fly a mere model.

I’ll name all the original members I can remember: Barney Barnes, Mark Potter, and Tommy Skaggs C.R. Fowler. Those are all I can remember at this time.

Soon after we started flying, Tony Hunt and David Phelps joined us. Then came Jim Hoover, and Richard Peck and Beasley.

We were flying at the abandoned airport on road. We asked a fellow that was a member of the old club that was in existence and disbanded long before we decided to form a club to teach us to fly. This didn’t work out too well and we ended up teaching ourselves to fly. As you can imagine that was a bad mistake, but there wasn’t anyone else that we knew of to teach us.

After countless crashes and unbelievable carnage we eventually learned to fly. In a few years we began to be harassed by kids on bicycles riding down the runway when we were trying to land, then in a short while a group of adults began to ride horses on our runway. The horses left lots of little gifts for us. Barney broke an entire blade off his propeller on one of those little gifts on take off and flew the traffic pattern and landed without shaking his engine off the mounts. Soon after this we decided to move to a new flying site.

We went to Bronston, next to Hwy 90 in a hay field that a fellow agreed to let us fly in. We began to have problems because we were very close to the highway and some houses across the highway, so we moved further up the hill to another location further away from the highway. This is where Tony Burris found us.

All too soon the farmer decided that he needed to let his hay grow for harvest, so we were out of a place to fly again. Then one day C.V. Weddle showed up at our field and when he learned that we were in need of a field he offered a place on his farm.

We moved to C.V's Farm in 1985 or 1987, I can’t remember exactly but it was one or the other of those years, and we’ve been there ever since. Our club remained quite small for many years. We had many Mall shows which we enjoyed, but we never got even one new member from any of our shows. We eventually decided to quit doing the shows because it was beginning to get a little expensive and it hadn’t done anything for us in the way of new members.
We cruised along for many years when a normal Sunday crowd would be between six to eight, flyers. There were years that we didn’t have enough money to pay for the mowing of our field, but we were fortunate that Roy Hinklin would accept whatever we had to offer him.

About three years ago our membership began to increase. Since then it has continued to increase to the point that our field is too small to park the cars of the flyers on a pretty, warm Sunday afternoon.

Fortune has again smiled on us, just as it did many years ago when C.V. offered us a place to fly. Thanks to Randy, who has quietly and relentlessly been negotiating with the owners of a wonderful flying site, and to the great bunch of mostly new members who have joined in to do the hard work ahead (and that includes a bunch of our oldies too) it appears that we may have a grand new flying field for our grand old club, the Somerset Model Airplane Club.