I met Ray Henning when I was building my first airplane, around 1969 or 1970. I would frequently go to breakfast at a coffee shop called Mr. C’s — long extinct — with the late John Thorp and whichever of his cronies happened to be around when that time of the morning came. Mr. C’s was pretty far from my house, but Thorp was a good friend, he let me use his brake and shear to cut and bend sheet metal, he was generous with advice, and I liked Mr. C’s bear claws.
Thorp’s shop was in a Los Angeles suburb called Sun Valley. He had a single employee, a metal man named Vaughn Parker. Parker was a lean, taciturn fellow; he always struck me as being a Midwestern farmer type, though, never having been on any Midwestern farms, I actually don’t know whether there even is such a type. Thorp’s T-18 homebuilt had been introduced a few years earlier, and builders would come to the shop to use his tooling for wing ribs and fuselage frames and to take advantage of Parker’s skill and experience.
