For many in aviation, attending EAA AirVenture Oshkosh is an annual touchstone and we recall our participation in many ways. Mine is a memory bin, the yellow office trash can I got from Crate & Barrel when the U.S. Navy finished with me in February 1978. It displays the Champion stickers that mark my pilgrimage in anal-retentive columns six stickers. I’m on my seventh column now, and as I have for decades, I’ll pocket my 40th Champion sticker on the first day, this year on July 23, as a token of good things to come.
Each one is a multicolored oval that highlights the year. The colors are never the same, but all of them appear to be on a ribbon headed by EAA, with the Champion bowtie logo providing the ribbon’s tails. Individually, they are visual mnemonics that recall each year’s pilgrimage. As it is for anyone’s first time, my inaugural participation in 1978 overwhelmed me. The dominant memories are my o-dark-thirty departure and a three-hour drive for a gate-opening arrival, wandering freely along the flight line that was open only to EAA members and pilots, and setting up camp Saturday night in Schiefelbein’s cow pasture.
Other stickers recollect the weather. There was the triple-digit heat in the early 1980s, and more than a few years when I sought shelter from a deluge in a Porta-Potty. A decade later the unforecast cold weather justified the purchase of an insulated flight jacket to my first wife. And almost every year recollected a daily battle with dehydration. I won’t bore you with all the people and planes buzzing now between my ears.
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