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The Keith Irwin I Knew

By Dwight Morejohn
May, 2004

The morning was perfect. County Road 97-D seemed
damp from the night as my sister and I walked to the school bus.
The still morning air seemed to be waiting expectantly
for that familiar, wavering drone drifting across the
fields heard on many of these clear February mornings.
Squinting into the sun, my eyes skipped across the plowed
fields until they picked out that distant, lanky figure
on an old balloon-tired bike moving slowly along a
dirt road next to a cornfield. Tucked under one arm
could be seen a wide and splendid wing that unmistakably
identified Mr. Keith Irwin and one of his planes.
The morning sun passing through the wing
seemed to make it glow with light as he worked his way
between the fields. I lost sight of him behind the corn
and my thoughts turned back to the school bus.

It was actually not the school bus,
but the house at the end of the road
across from the where the bus stopped that my
sister and I were both thinking about. It was the house that
Mr. Irwin built and lived in, with its oddly-shaped triangular
walls and unusual colors, and behind his wooden plank
gate lurked the never-seen, fiercest-growling dog we
could imagine. We often held on to each other as we
approached tangency with his house, waiting
for the inevitable onslaught of terror. Later in life,
I learned it was Keith’s tiny, pint-sized, black and white
miniature bulldog, seen bustling about in a few of the photos
of his little living-room shop.

A few scenes like these show up on the pages of my early
memories as a young boy in rural west Davis, California.
It was the late fifties and early sixties then and
Mr. Irwin had recently retired from life as a dairy farmer to
fulfill his passion for building Old Timer model airplanes.
He was a quiet, opinionated, and sometimes ornery old gent
who mostly kept to himself. His wife had recently passed
away leaving him to care for their one child,
a sweet, tow-headed and willowy 6 year old, Kathy.
Though she was a schoolmate of mine, a grade or two
behind me in our little two-room, four-grade country schoolhouse,
I don’t recall more of her than what a couple
of faded black and white pictures can remind
me of some picnics in our back yard with the neighboring farm kids.
It was a good fifteen years after we left
Davis in 1961 before I met the two Irwins again.

After my teen years on a cattle and sheep ranch in
California’s San Joaquin Valley, I returned to
Davis for my university education. Through
a remarkable series of events, my newlywed wife
Kate and I moved into the very same 750 square foot house that I was raised in, the last house going north on Road 97-D. To our delight,
Keith and Kathy still lived in the same house at the south end of the mile-long road, with the big old barn with some goats to milk.
And the fierce little dog Benji still guarded the place,
though somehow his presence was much reduced now to normal proportions.

After all these years, Keith had not changed,
except for becoming perhaps a bit more cynical
about world affairs, truly living the life of a
hermit in his own little world, more and
more absorbed in his wonderful airplanes and simple habits.
He would sit for days, even weeks, in his sparse study,
slowly crafting a carefully chosen
Old Timer model from plans taped to a
drawing board on his card table workbench,
pinning and then cutting the balsa with the
sharpest razor he could find in his cardboard box of
single sided razor blades. His study was an
unpretentious museum of sorts, the walls
lined with the graceful bodies and perfect
wings of his fifty or so rice-paper covered beauties on
simple, saggingly-thin plywood shelves, strung
together from floor to ten-foot ceiling.
Once a plane was finished, he would wait for the right weather
(not hard in Davis) and then take his plane
out into the fields for test flying and trimming.
Most of his planes sport his own trim tabs,
fashioned conservatively from the wall of an
empty soda can. He would fly it for hours, sometimes days,
taking it back home for some adjustments
not suitably made in the field. He paid careful
attention to engine mount angles,
weight distribution, wheel shape and position,
flight surfaces, air-piston timers for
de-thermalizer tails and of course, the engines themselves.

His engines were invariably one of two types,
either a spark-plug gas engine or a smaller,
non-glow plug, compression-ignition diesel engine.
He would typically purchase a particular vintage gas engine
that he had nourished an interest in through an ad in an
Old Timer publication, and had collected a
couple of dozen of these engines.
About half of them were mounted in planes,
the other half forming a small collection by themselves.
The compression-ignition powerplants ran on a
mixture of ether, kerosene and castor oil
or 30wt engine oil, - approximately one third part each.
This was Keith’s recipe, unlike the usual 50% ether,
25% kerosene and 25% castor or 50-60 wt engine oil.

Once the plane flew to his satisfaction,
he would hang it on his wall, and after much thought,
begin the next one. Keith kept a very small,
spiral bound, red notebook with cryptic field
notes to himself in pencil on almost every plane,
including how the plane ought to be launched,
particular engine settings, and what should not be done.
It is full of his simplistic character and is an
important but small part of the collection,
especially when taking a plane out to fly.
There were a half dozen of the fifty or so
planes that were his favorite fliers and
he could often be seen watching the
lazy glide of one of these favorites
returning to earth in great spirals overhead,
almost always landing unceremoniously
tipped tail-up amid the dirt-clods.

It was during these times, around
1976, when Keith roamed the dirt fields
along Road 97-D on his old bike, looking
for just the right place to launch and watch
his free-flight creations soar, that we became
reacquainted and real friends. With plane under one arm
and his little toolbox clutched together with
one handlebar in the other hand, he would stop
and talk with me on the road about the day’s aerial
adventures or some technical detail he was pondering.
Keith took interest in me, as I was involved in engineering,
and I spent many an hour at his house during his later
years watching him at work, and getting to know the planes.
As generous as he was spartan, he insisted that
I take a couple of the planes as my own, to fly
with our first son when he was old enough.
He seemed to take great pleasure in having a
fellow enthusiast who was willing to listen at his
pace or ply him for explanations about his particular
design modifications. Eventually he had added a half
dozen of his planes to my home.

Keith was quite a character. Tall and angular,
he had a square, jutting jaw and chin, and bushy,
dark-gray brows above his thick-rimmed glasses.
Outside, he would usually wear a floppy, short-brimmed hat or,
in winter months, a woolen beanie cap pulled all the way down.
He never had more than a thin old jacket on for the coldest
mornings and always the same old leather shoes.
His long arms and big hands belied a delicate touch.
I wonder how much of what I remember of
Keith was a carry-over from when he was a dairy farmer.
Often with a three day old beard,
but always clean and wearing a comfy old flannel shirt
and jeans he moved about his yard and house with
nonchalance. Never in a hurry,
his talk was quiet and his humor very dry.
While he was modest and most considerate,
especially around women, he was also quite
socially awkward, either talking over the other’s words as a
thought came to him or injecting an unexpected
single-syllable laugh at an odd moment.
When I was with him in his study, he would often ramble
on with some social commentary as he worked,
barely discernable, punctuated here and
there with that startling laugh.
He typically had an old radio on,
listening to his favorite San Francisco talk show,
and had much to say about the current events.
His meals were small and simple, and precisely the same day after day.
A couple of times each month his ‘60’s
green Ford step-side pickup would rumble to
life and take him into town for some basic provisions.

He pored over just a few old model airplane
publications, some from the thirties and forties,
and made notes about various planes and airfoils
and fuel mixtures in the margins and inside the covers.
These notes, from the handful of printed materials of
his that remain, provide a tantalizing glimpse into
his thought process and are a few more pieces
to the puzzle of his lone existence.
Then there is the apple box full of his
blue-line kit plans and enlarged
magazine plans, some cut up and with notes and
pin holes from use on his workbench, some waiting for a day that never came.

The late 70’s were busy times for Kate and me
on Road 97-D with our children coming and my
new business started. Keith’s daughter
Kathy had her dad’s artistic eye and had
become a pen and ink artist with a wonderfully
unique, homespun style. She was a dear friend and
became a happy member of our church community,
soon marrying and starting a family of her own.
One of her original works always hangs in our living room,
that of her view of our first little house on that country road,
with all the important animals and trees included.

In 1981 Kate and I moved into town as we were expecting
our third and had run out of room.
It was not long after that; we heard the sad news that Keith had cancer.
Some of my most memorable times with
him unfolded in the next several months.
Stubborn to the end, he refused treatment,
and his life eventually ground to a halt.
He was confined to a wheelchair at home.
I called him one Saturday morning,
after trying futilely for a couple of hours to
start the small compression-ignition Mills
engine on the little green Pixie.
He had given me this one for my oldest daughter,
and I was determined to get it in the air.
Using a trimmed away one-fingered leather
glove as he did on occasion, I fussed with
fuel mixtures and compression settings and propeller
spinning techniques until I was worn out.
Keith was up for a visit and I headed out to his farm.
With the fuel tank empty, I remember him
feeling the compression as he rotated the prop,
squirting in just the right amount of fuel into the
exhaust port, giving it three quick spins and it popped to life.
He aimed it out the window and turned it
loose where it made a short flight out
to the grass between his eucalyptus trees.
“You just have to know what it wants”, he said with a smile.

Keith didn’t last much longer. In the hospital bed a
few days before he died, he held my hand and said,
“The planes are yours.” And that there was no other person
that he would want to have own the planes than myself.
This came as a surprise to me, somewhat overwhelming
in it’s magnitude of responsibility and sheer numbers,
but I knew that he was serious and that it was right,
it was the most reasonable way to preserve the collection,
and I began the task of making room in my life.
Sadly, beyond his dear daughter
Kathy, I do not believe he had any other close friend
at the end of his life but myself.

The Morejohn Irwin collection

Kathy wanted to keep a favorite of hers, Skyrocket,
a streamlined, tear-drop shaped beauty with green trim.
Finding space for the remainder of the collection was a
large organizational challenge as I had to find room in my
full one-car garage/shop. This was alleviated a bit by
giving a few of them to close friends of mine, other
fathers with young children. Looking back now,
this split the collection up some,
but it is also just another transition where
planes have come and gone. When I thumb through
Keith’s photo album of his collection, full of black and
white photos but far too few dates and notes,
I see many planes made before my time, including some
yet to be identified, that no longer exist in the current collection.
I remember Keith telling me stories of planes he lost in
thermals only to descend unseen over relatively
cooler cornfields.
One favorite in particular he pursued by hiring
a local pilot to take him up and scout for it for
hours until he spotted its white silhouette spread
out on top of the field of green.
I arranged the planes in my garage hanging like so
many still sardines, wingless and strung nose-up from
the rafters in rows. The wings I placed in specially-constructed
shelves stacked many deep and high, each identified with
the name of its plane under one tip.
Here they quietly rested for about two decades,
only a few were taken down on those special
evenings for flying, or at least gliding them
down the street with my kids.
The planes possess a fabulous balance
and the flat glide angle that makes these well-constructed
Old Timers such a joy to watch in flight.

My life in Davis, running my own design-engineering
firm over the same two decades from my home,
radically changed in 1996. I never expected that an entrepreneur
in Silicon Valley, Chuck Taylor, who was starting up a medical device company,
would soon coax me to step out of my own business, and
become my boss, co-inventor, and close friend.
Chuck’s story deserves its own volume,
but the slice of relevance here is that he
is an avid model airplane builder himself,
one with an uncanny sense of design and purpose,
unrelenting in gaining understanding of how and
why things work as they do. A modeler since youth,
every plane he ever built was subject to much remodeling
and experimentation. Enjoying the range of models from
screaming slope-soarers to park fliers to tiny, transparent
indoor floaters, he and I immediately had much to share
and muse about over my collection of handcrafted Old Timers.

In 1999, Chuck started a second start-up business
and took me with him from his original venture
to South San Francisco in year 2000. Here,
the company Syneon began, a technology-incubator
firm inside a large warehouse that Chuck meticulously
retrofitted with white walls, spacious shop, laboratory
and office space. It wasn’t long before the now-named
“Morejohn-Irwin model airplane collection” had found a new
home; the high, white ceilings inside the warehouse
became a perfect three-dimensional volume to safely
suspend the beauties as if in flight, for all to see.
Over a period of a couple of years, I transported groups of
planes from my Davis home to Syneon where Chuck and
I would stay after hours, cleaning, photographing and hanging.
And of
course, some not without first the essential
glide-testing inside their new hanger, before
being suspended, each with its own string and pulley system.

So this is the brief overview of the story of
the planes carefully crafted by my friend
Keith Irwin from the late 1940’s through the
early 1980’s, now on virtual display for all via this website.
It is our hope that you will enjoy and be inspired in your
own connection to the world of flying from the photos,
most of which are accompanied by
some of the individual plane’s specs.
We plan to continue adding a few salient
and interesting morsels of information
about each plane from Keith’s notes as
time allows, including a few corrections or
additions to make the information more accurate.
I have some old black and white photos of
his planes that he took over the years and a few color
shots that I took out in the fields with Keith
(including one of Keith himself on his bike)
that I will be scanning to add to the site.
We also have plans to add the
engine collection as well, so bookmark the
site for occasional update checks.
We welcome your comments and questions via email.

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