Introduction
I was a latchkey child for a significant period of my formative years. In order to fill my void of parental supervision, naturally I took to a new figurative “babysitter” in lieu of adult guidance: the babysitter’s name was Nintendo Entertainment System. Many long hours were spent playing that old console, and with many hours of gameplay came impressionable influences via a classic game of the ages — Super Mario Brothers 3.
My older sister Mary Kathryn and I would take turns in regular story mode of that game; she was Mario, and I was Luigi. All in all, we’d pour countless time into striving to complete all eight worlds with or without magic warp flutes. The strong influence I had with the game prompted me to spawn my new creative outlets, some of which were comics drawn with crayons featuring characters that were obvious rip-offs of Koopas from the game — whilst another new creative venture of mine was the prospect of conceptualizing — and ultimately hopefully constructing an armada of fully-operational flying airships, in addition to a fleet of wooden tanks on the ground!
For anyone who’s never played the game, I’ll give a quick summarized explanation of the wooden ships and tanks. At the end of each world in the game, the protagonist boards a giant flying wooden battleship which houses a specific boss character inside the ship’s cabin. Then in the final world of the game, the protagonist squares off against a fleet of wooden army tanks on the ground, followed by numerous wooden ships at sea and in the sky. These video game levels and their aesthetics had a serious influence on my creative prospects and prompted me to make life imitate art — despite the absurdity of the idea.
Brainstorm
This grand idea more or less came to me one late night that summer as I had a sort of spiritual moment, so to speak. It all started one night as I was watching Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi on late night cable TV with one of our old family friends who was watching us kids as my mother worked a late shift. Seeing the abundant starfighters and space combat on TV in conjunction with my spiritual bond with Super Mario Bros. 3 caused a meltdown of ideas to go off in my head. It was like a bolt of lightning striking me in the brain, giving me ideas like I’ve never had ideas before.
It was at that moment in the summer of 1993 at age 8 that I stayed up all night drawing pictures of Super Mario Bros. 3 airships, tanks, and mini flying ships with a fantasy in my head of actually building and piloting those contraptions in real life for air and ground combat. Soon after this amalgamation of ideas, I ran around wild with my notebooks in hand as I spouted off incoherent garble to my sisters, to explain to them my new ideas. They interpreted my gist of potentially flying in an airship, but considered me a madman.
Towards the end of my 1993 summer vacation consisting of staying up all night watching VH1, the Weather Channel, and Nickelodeon cartoons, I’d sketch up endless amounts of crude schematics for potential wooden airships much akin to those of King Bowser Koopa himself, straight from the iconic Nintendo games!
My improbable childish ambition totally eclipsed the fact that each ship was much too rickety to support itself — let alone being completely incapable of achieving flight in the slightest bit — not to mention the fact that I had no ability to purchase abundant amounts of wooden logs, plywood, electrical components, and then ultimately construct the grand task. But who cares: when you’re eight years old and raised on video games, your imagination outweighs any scientific logic and/or plausible engineering savvy.
A quick side note I’d like to point out about my personal preferences in literature: I actually dislike a lot of fiction, and instead as a child I preferred non-fiction books. With that being said, while other fellow students of mine in elementary school were prone to reading those Babysitter Club mini-novels, I was quietly reading all sorts of reference books on astronomy, the 1960s space program, NASA space shuttles, and lastly books on pirates. My combined fascination for the stars above in conjunction with large wooden battleships only made my desire to fly around in a replica Mario airship only more and more anxious!
Eventually I began to deviate a bit in design and slightly alter my plans to make the ships a little more custom and original against the video game they were inspired by. In other words, initially I wanted to make exact replicas of the giant airships from the video game, but eventually opted to make completely new original concepts merely inspired by the game. Unlike the ones in the games, my new ship ideas had better artillery, different color schemes, and best of all, escape pods that transformed into mini-airships! I even had a fantasy of installing an early 1990s era Motorola car phone inside the ship just to call my buddies and inform them to look outside their windows to see a giant wooden ship approaching!
As I sketched up on paper multiple vessels for my aerial armada, I decided that when my plans eventually came to fruition that I would paint each ship a specific color; for example, my personal flagship was to be neon red, and others of its class were neon yellow. I think I even politely designed some pink and purple ones for the sisters, and possibly a bright blue one for some friends. This of course was based on the assumption that I could build at least one working vessel, let alone a whole fleet.
In my head at the time, the fact that an airship of mine intended to lift off the ground and travel in a straight course by ways of random propellers stuck to the back of everything made perfect sense. There was no questionable logic there: cartoons and video games taught me that propellers = flying, with no need for a rudder for steering, engines for thrust, nor wings to achieve lift. Regardless of these pseudo-scientific monstrosities, I already began calling up lumber yards to inquire about the cost of building materials. When that seemed too pricey (considering I was a kid with no job), I started scrounging for wooden building supplies and piling them in my backyard. Somehow I managed to stumble upon several discarded (albeit small) logs, scrounged up within our neighborhood. I found about maybe six or seven of them, and kept them on the back patio.
I’m pretty sure my mom questioned me with, “Why are there a bunch of rotten logs on the back porch?” and shook her head and walked away in apathetic confusion when I tried to explain to her I was trying to build a flying vessel (in all seriousness). For those of you unaware of the designs of the airships from the video game, the ships are these long, rickety vessels that appear to be assembled entirely from large logs, and therefore my planned ships would resemble likewise.
During one memorable point in the height of my initial airship craze, my family and I went out to eat at some restaurant, and on our way out to the car, my sister Mary spotted one of those coin donation spirals; you know, the ones that have you roll a coin down a slope make a wish if you land it in the target coin slot. Mary and I slid some pennies down the slope of the plastic spiral, and “made our wishes” akin to Tom Hanks in the 1987 film Big. Later in the car, my sister and I divulged our secret wishes: She told me, “I wished for world peace. . . And a new bike! What about you?” to which I responded, “I wished that when we get home, a giant anchor would magically appear in the living room!” She looked puzzled and asked, “Ummmmmm. . . Why would you possibly wish for an anchor of all things?”, to which I replied, “Well, I need an anchor for my airship! You know, the one I didn’t build yet. But as soon as it’s done, I’ll have a real anchor to use — assuming my wish comes true!”
Mary just stared and groaned in noticeable confusion. Now, some of you folks out there are probably asking yourselves, “Julius, this is just foolish logic. If you were legitimately convinced at the time that wishing for something would genuinely come true, why wish for one single component for the airship? Why not wish for the entire, workable, fully-operational vessel to magically appear in your backyard?” Well, it’s simple: that would cheapen the whole project. Clearly, the real “magic” of the concept of my airship was to design and build a working flying vessel from scratch with my bare hands, thus truly putting all of my proverbial blood, sweat, and tears into its completion. I was a pioneer and inventor — not a dreamer nor a cheater! As for that anchor wish? Well, I’m not a blacksmith either.
New Beginnings
Summer came to an end, and soon my 3rd grade school year had begun at a new school called Nitrauer Elementary; I lived in the same house as before, but due to some issue with registration, I attended a completely different school nearby in the same district. I was on the verge of turning nine years old, and most importantly, a new school meant new friends and potentially a new crew of mates to help fly and assemble my airship. My newest best friend in the 1993–94 year was a fellow named Hunter, who was another quirky and creative kid with an artistic talent.
Hunter had a strict religious upbringing, and although we had a lot in common with each other personality-wise, there was actually a strange juxtaposition regarding our sources of imagination. Hunter actually didn’t own any console video games and also rarely watched TV, yet he was a huge fan of fantasy literature such as Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit books; as for myself, I had a steady supply of Nintendo games and TV shows to fuel my creativity, whilst I almost exclusively read non-fiction books in my leisure and at school. Despite the strange mismatching of our creative muses, he and I bonded pretty quickly and exchanged creative ideas for potential projects to hopefully execute.
When Hunter learned of my plan to construct a wooden flying machine, he had no knowledge of the Super Mario Bros. series, let alone what what the airship levels looked like. Hunter instead collaborated on my project by creating his own airship plans on paper — but instead of being rip-offs of Super Mario vehicles, they were rip-offs of The Dawn Treader ship from Chronicles of Narnia!
The entire basic design premise behind my airship plan was to have the general ship frame to be very flat, rickety and stretched out over a long span, akin to the ones seen in the games. Hunter’s drawings, however, contained the ship to be much smaller, rounder, and more reminiscent of a traditional schooner or a Viking boat — but with a giant helicopter blade on top of the mast and sails — whereas my ships had no mast nor sails whatsoever! Hunter’s ships were intended to be used for peace and casual flight, whereas mine were designed for combat, conquest, and aerial warfare! I mean, come on; it’s a doom ship — of course it must contain cannons and flamethrowers!
Who exactly would my armada be attacking? What targets would I bring siege and terror to? I hadn’t really thought ahead that far yet. Somehow I naturally assumed that if I built up a large armada of flying vessels and armaments, some unknown foes would magically appear, steal my ideas, and declare airborne battles against me! In retrospect, those “foes’’ would have most likely just been the Federal Aviation Administration and/or the Air National Guard mistaking me for a UFO; and this was all pre-9/11, mind you.
Throughout the school year Hunter and I spent numerous indoor recesses using colored pencils to draw pictures of our ideas. Fortunately for us, his father Stu was employed as a woodworker and thus had access to power equipment, as well as those precious wood building materials I desperately needed to construct the entirety of my ship. Despite Hunter’s ship designs which clashed with my desired blueprints, his father the carpenter was vital to my plans if I actually wanted this thing to get started. I more or less had to compromise with some of Hunter’s sailboat ideas incorporated with my Nintendo-esque intentions.
And so, at Hunter’s house we started with the first small scale mockups of the first doom ship — which was unnamed at the time. I forget if I actually came up with something clever to call it, or if I merely stuck with a generic, unenlightened name like “The S.S. Brunk” or “The U.S.S. Brunkerprise.” Although later in life as I designed better aircraft, subsequent flying vessels would contain more clever titles and model numbers — as you’ll eventually hear about in later stories of mine. Anyway, we built the first few samples of the ship concept made from our traditional, precious resource: LEGO bricks. In fact, Hunter underestimated the size I had planned for my ships, hence he assumed we could in fact use LEGO pieces as the primary material for the final ship’s hull — under the assumption that each ship would be about the size of a standard canoe!
He must have thought this was a big joke. This wasn’t just some flash of the pan pipe dream at the time, as this was in fact a legitimate idea I seriously intended to build — a giant, several-hundred foot wooden battleship to be docked in my backyard! Not a toy, but a breakthrough in scientific aeronautic discovery that would make NASA blush!
The Right Stuff
Throughout the 1994 year, I began a fascination of reading reference books on massive machines such as hovercrafts, hydrofoils, and F-16 jet fighters to get an accurate idea of how to achieve the necessary flying components. In fact, during that school year, Nitrauer Elementary had a sort of mini science fair for the students to voluntarily construct little modules to exhibit their research in scientific discovery. Think of a traditional school science fair, but on a smaller scale and completely on a voluntary basis — and with no competition. Imagine a simple exhibition of table displays featuring homemade posters and miniature models assembled by the kids, strictly for fun and education, as there were no awards to be given.
I personally assembled a cardboard display to briefly showcase three prominent airplanes in aviation history, which I read about in my independent research: the Fokker Dr.I triplane as piloted by Baron Manfred von Richthofen (a.k.a. the Red Baron), the F-16 Fighting Falcon, and the Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde jet. My display was basically a folded sheet of cardboard with a couple of Xeroxed photos of those aforementioned airplanes, containing little paragraphs summarizing each aircraft. Pretty standard for a 9-year old kid in the pre-internet, pre-Wikipedia era.
Towards the end of the year I still continued to hopefully and eventually build my airship alongside Hunter, but my fascination started to wane as I became more fascinated with jet engines, and instead wanted to tinker with building traditional airplanes rather than a majestic flying ship. I would occasionally and sporadically continue to make random drawings of my proposed airship ideas at that point, but quite frankly I wanted to move onto other exciting ventures. I even read about aerodynamics and Chuck Yeager’s landmark supersonic flight, which in my mind made the idea of a slow-moving wooden airship pale in comparison to the thrill of a screaming jet plane. Mind you, a child potentially constructing and flying a working jet plane was just as dubious (if not more dubious) than a child constructing a large wooden flying ship, but at that age, my imagination was absolutely out of control.
But back to the airship proper: in terms of my ship’s concept art on paper, the wooden frame and general layout of the ship was essentially taken care of; now came the time to figure out how exactly it could actually lift off the ground and travel for great distances. That of course was the challenge, considering the best solutions I could come up with were propellers being driven by bicycles, which implied I required a crew of able-bodied individuals to consistently help rotate the fan blades — almost like a modern-but-primitive Viking ship with slaves manning the large, threshing oars. My only volunteer to help spin the blades was my 4-year old sister Cecelia, who agreed to be first mate of the ship.
Aside from Hunter’s potential help of providing us with lumber and tools and despite my little sister agreeing to help me fly the ship, all in all, a 9-year old kid with a distorted view of engineering who was accompanied by a small girl who could barely read or write couldn’t quite propel an impractical flying machine that defied all laws of science. Suffice it to say, the ship was never built, and the few wooden logs I foraged were eventually discarded into the cluster of pine trees behind my house. I still however remained fascinated afar by large flying machines, and would continue learning about more of them in due time — and hoped to eventually accomplish my goal.
Grounded
Having failed at an attempt to rival with the doom ships of the video game, Bowser Koopa remained only green with reptilian scales, and not green with envy. My spirits were low and grounded such as the proverbial non-flying capabilities of my airship, and it would take something of a Zeppelin-sized magnitude to get me metaphorically flying high again — which is precisely why I still continued designing alternative amateur aircraft throughout the remainder of my youth!
This was the end of my attempt at building a giant wooden airship, but it wouldn’t be my final attempt at amateur aircraft in general.
-Baron von Brunk