MCRCS Turkey Fly

2008 Turkey Fly

Sunday, November 9th

The Turkey Fly is a longstanding tradition at our club. Once a year we get together, rain, shine, or snow, to fly for raffle tickets: one ticket for showing up and one for each flight, up to three. Then we draw tickets to see who gets a turkey. Usually, we have about thirty turkeys to distribute.

Although the rules of the event are simple, efforts to uncover its true roots have failed. Even past-president and long-time member Dave Babcock could only recall the time when he expanded the event from a few to "a lot of turkeys," and carried the concept over to the Ham Fly on New Year’s Day.

Of course, a little thought can result in at least some idle speculation regarding the origins of the event: Ours is a sport pursued primarily by men, sort of like hunting or fishing. And we are something like the sportsman who, having spent several hundred dollars, several days, and significant mental and physical energy pursuing the elusive buck or the big one that got away, faces his wife and her perennial question: "What’d you bring home, Honey?" Of course, more often than not, we as pilots are greeted with the related query, "Honey, did you crash anything?"

The sports of hunting and fishing, having longer traditions than our sport, have developed defense mechanisms for handling the inevitable question. The fishermen had it the easiest: "Honey, I’m a catch-and-release guy; we don’t keep the whoppers we hook." It was more problematic for hunters, though, as "shoot and release" never seemed to catch on. This probably resulted in the turkey shoot in which hunters could exercise their expensive Browning automatics, blasting clay pigeons from the sky for the better part of a day. And with a modicum of skill, they could then respond, "I got a 24-pound turkey, Dear, a real beauty. And it’s already been cleaned."

So it isn’t a real stretch to imagine a time when one of our early pioneers, say Warren Kruse, or Doug McMillan, or Joe Spett was out flying on a cold fall day. If a hunter had stumbled across the field, the men would have shared conversation and perhaps a cup of hot coffee. Say, in the midst of discussion, the topic of wives came up and how sometimes they just don’t understand. At that point the hunter might have offered how he’d had the problem until he discovered the turkey shoot. He wasn’t sure, he’d said, that his wife really believed he’d shot the bird, but that didn’t really seem to matter. Regardless of its source, she was proud of him for bringing it home.

The conversation may have gone off on a tangent at that point as the hunter wondered out loud what it would be like to shoot an RC model down, and discussion would have ended shortly thereafter. The important thing is that, somewhere during the conversation, Joe, Warren, Doug, or some unsung hero realized we could hold our own turkey event, a turkey fly. And when queried by our wives about whether we’d crashed, we’d have the response, "No, but the strangest thing happened as I was flying the pattern. This big flock of white turkeys flew right into me. It really didn’t do much damage to my plane, but I brought one of the big ones home. It’s already cleaned and it’s a real beauty."