... many a veteran model aircraft builder can put the most opinionated glamor-boy pilot to shame.

It breaks my heart to think about how my dad can’t do these things anymore—cars, motorcycles, model airplanes—things he called his “hobbies,” but that were more like a vocation, more like his whole life. They brought him so much satisfaction and, maybe, respite, an eye of calm in the middle of the turbulence of his family life, starting when he was a teenager and lasting until a few years ago as he started to lose the physical dexterity and mental acuity these activities required.

I think it might be the whole reason he and I were so often at loggerheads, why I made him so angry and he made me so angry: that I inherited (or learned from him) his creativity and taste and talent but not his discipline and focus, rigor. Thankfully—and it took almost a lifetime—the heat’s turned down on those feelings, and now I’m just grateful that there is no shortage of evidence in the record of my dad being excellent at things he loved to do.

This article in the Albert Lea Tribune is from 1950; he was 16.