For Openers
This is a serious and difficult editorial to write. It is unavoidable. In this space your editor wished always to be upbeat, and it is galling to break that rule. But insult has been added to injury.
As we go to press, we hear that one magazine is considering publication of a letter—with pie chart—that is the subject of what you will read here, and according to its editor, because of the "public right to know." To know what? Presumably, to know what that letter-writer thinks. But that's a matter of opinion. AMA has over 70,000 members and they hold many different opinions. Is AMA supposed to print them all?
In this case, however, the bottom line is that the letter-writer disagrees with how AMA spends its money. He would have AMA stop spending it on a magazine and provide other services instead. He also blames the magazine for having caused AMA's current dues increase. Model Aviation is guilty until proved innocent.
That's his bottom line. Ours is quite different. We know that Model Aviation has never received monies from AMA General Funds, that it has its own independent budget, has always been in the black, and operates with only its own income. We also know that Model Aviation is vital to the future growth of the Academy.
So we push all our chips into the center of the table, and cry "Call!" These are the goodwill chips from a lifetime of editing magazines for you, your fathers, many of your grandfathers. What honor is mine rides on this pot. Now what is this editorial really about?
It is about truth.
It is mainly about the magazine, and a bit about AMA, membership, money.
It is written because of the circulation of scattergun critiques by self-appointed experts—"information" that cannot go unchallenged.
There has been a membership cost increase. There is murky confusion about the magazine and its supposed effects on AMA finances. And there is, throughout the land, in all walks of life, a digging in of heels against rising costs. Since the writer is the editor of Model Aviation, permit us to begin with the magazine.
To set that scene it is to be understood that, left to its own devices, AMA membership would come to its individual conclusions. But it is not left to its own devices. We are assailed by well-meaning people who pursue phantom devils. Among them, people who predicted that, almost four years ago, the magazine would bankrupt the AMA; who now point to the increased cost of membership as proof of their extrasensory perception. What some of these people are saying about the magazine is tantamount to telling F.O. that his mother wore army boots.
OK, let's suppose the magazine is on the witness stand. The prosecutor shows a pie chart of AMA dollars with Model Aviation as a monster slice. The chart also shows a second monster slice for salaries, and tiny slices for activities—upon which the great portion of salaries really are spent (but it doesn't show that). But we won't argue with that chart over which a good man must have labored, because the question it seems to ask is, "have you stopped beating your wife?" In that sense the chart cannot be dismissed.
However, that chart should have been accompanied by one to show income—the slice showing MA's income would have been larger than the one showing its expenditures.
F.O.'s modest brain boggles at this upside-down accounting. All the money for the magazine, prior to 1979, came from people who specifically ordered and paid for their subscriptions, and from plan sales, advertising, and hobby shop sales. If MA did not exist, that money would not have existed either. And, in 1979, since the dues increase for Open members includes $8 for the magazine, that portion of the increase would not exist if the magazine were abolished. How does one fund other causes with nothing?
AMA never appropriated any membership money for the magazine. Since early 1975, until a few weeks ago, as this is written, what you paid for your membership was 100% for what it provides—for example, insurance and many other services, completely aside from AMA general activities. Model Aviation was, and still is, an independently accounted item.
Not one red cent has been spent on the magazine (1975, '76, '77, '78) from General Funds. MA began in a corner of a storeroom four years ago—to the thunder of critics who screamed all sorts of imagined disasters, to the AMA, to themselves, and to their magazines. After four years, not one of these fears has materialized.
The editor's aim is to achieve the relationship between MA and the AMA that exists between National Geographic and its Society. The Society, numbering almost 10,000,000 members, depends on its magazine for membership and growth. The Society was built on National Geographic. Big memberships mean reduced individual costs, increased benefits—and clout. MA already is producing membership from the outside world, though on a modest but growing scale at present. Who is to say that its continued evolution would not occasion between 100,000 and 200,000 AMA members in the not-too-distant future—still less than the 30-years-ago Air Trails audience. So it can be done.
Does MA lose money? Hell no! In spite of "expert" predictions it hasn't yet, even from the first lean years; due in part to tight stewardship from Publisher Carl Wheeley (formerly Secretary-Treasurer of AMA—and member of the U.S. Free Flight Team in '53 and '54). Carl has long been AMA's in-house ultra-conservative—he believes in budgets, and living within them. (Do look at our chart, page 70—it shows the real situation.)
F.O. could be a much-needed ombudsman for the AMA—if he didn't already work for you. He is really an "outsider," the hired help but not an AMA administrative mainliner, more like a "fly on the wall." We look upon all we see within AMA with worldly cynicism. We perceive no people with horns, or cloaks. Not even clock-watchers. But we see some whose hearts can be saddened. Like TV's Dangerfield, they "don't get no respect."
We see irony. The power center of the AMA is not even in Washington. Under the by-laws, the membership elects district vice presidents, who also are Council members. Almost all are from far away states. The caliber of these people testifies to the judgment of the members who elected them—they are capable. As a group they meet four times a year and deal, to the best of their abilities, with matters before them. Their qualifications as businessmen and in private life are impeccable.
But we don't defend them, for the perfect is not to be expected by anyone of any human being. And, perhaps, they feel no defense by F.O. is needed, or welcome. Perhaps they make mistakes—we cannot say. Perhaps their timing of things is not always brilliant. But they are not devious, not calculating, not political—they are modelers, serving voluntarily. To know them is to believe that what they decide is motivated only by what they feel is best for all. Sometimes this means that the Executive Director is a minority in a Council meeting in which, even if it happens that he is right, it is the Council that is in charge. There is no governmental agency-type Secretary in Washington that can be "Big Brother" to us all.
For what F.O. is about to say, he could receive a pink slip. It is simply this. Recent actions have taken place. They are done with. While some of us may drop by the wayside for a while, we will go on growing. But, Council, do hear the message from those members who call out to proceed with caution when you lay out new programs, with their added expenses, even if they are things we members think the AMA should do.
Most members are above all this, and the dues increase is less than the cost of their next week's fuel. Many buy one other magazine for almost as much as AMA asks for a magazine, insurance, and other benefits. But others among us ask, "Should we go on?" In response here to the few people who have addressed the editor, let us keep our cool. Dues increases, however necessary, brew negative reactions—nobody willingly accepts higher prices. But we can't let "experts" confuse us. We individual members can make our own assessments.
And, finally, to you patient readers who may say, "Fine for you—AMA pays your salary," we answer simply, "We should hope so!" We can do as well in other ways, but like an old warhorse, F.O. likes the sniff of the battlefield—the challenge to improve the magazine, and to see it firmly on its way as a membership tool, par excellence, to help AMA grow and prosper.
That "right to know," in the way that the words were used in this discussion, is a parody of the Supreme Court decision's meaning. Should everyone's correspondence with AMA headquarters be plastered on a billboard? In the present instance, any publication's demand that AMA print a letter of critique logically is based upon imagined need to shed light on some secretive wrongdoing. AMA has been asked to account for paper clips, sugar cubes, etc., broken down as to AMA use and Model Aviation use. This is true and not a joke. Do they think this is Watergate? Where is Deep Throat? Will Judge Jaworski appear in our doorway? Enough already!
Speaking of rights, do almost 50,000 people who wanted and paid for Model Aviation in 1978 have any? Can one or two "critics" seriously think so many people, the great majority of Open members, can be denied what they prefer?
To those troubled by all this, F.O. offers these words by the late President Jack Kennedy:
"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our fore-bearers. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."
For Openers — Winter
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
