Whew, you all have had busy fingers while my computer was down for two days! I just got it all read. Some comments:
Wayne wrote: >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> I would love to see the existing club, or a new club, publish a better newsletter, conduct fly-ins, promote the airplane, and be more proactive. I don't mean to slam the existing newsletter or club management. I've been involved in publishing a couple of newsletters for work, and it's not a trivial task. Twisting people's arms to get them to contribute articles can be a job in itself. It also takes lots of dedication and commitment to publish a newsletter month after month, especially after the novelty of it wears off. And to EOC's credit, Coupe Capers has been published for many, many years. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> During the 3.5 years I edited the Coupe Capers, it took about 50 hours per month including all the soliciting of content from the membership, finding and working with regular expert contributors, typing, working with photos and doing the desktop publishing. Youre right that twisting people arms to get them to contribute articles can be a job in itself. Yet that is one of the very most important parts of the editors job without good content, you cant have a good publication. I was able to get enough good content coming in for Coupe Capers to be 16-20 pages a month. Content and quality is what counts. During the 3½ years I did Coupe Capers, we had a substantial increase in club membership. Im afraid that in the subsequent 13 years, the membership has dropped off to even lower than it was before I started editing CC. Dan Hall wrote: >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> IMHO - We also very much need to continue Ed Burkhead's work by carefully documenting Coupe specific technical information and posting on the web for reference by all. It seems to me that rather basic things like detailed annual inspection information written to the level of a typical owner WITH PHOTOS would be a good start. Details regarding each of the ADs & STCs (again, with photos!) would be great, as would an index of maintenance & repair tasks such as correct re-rigging and other typical Ercoupe specific issues (all with PHOTOS). General info on things like the engine and accessories would be nice too. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< When Tom Laird-McConnell and I created the ercoupe.org website for the EOC, we envisioned just that kind of permanent reference as well as dynamic content in the members-only section. That, also, takes active involvement to solicit material and maintain. (Great compliments to the current volunteer webmaster who maintains the site for free even though hes sold his Coupe and is just continuing in the job from goodness.) Heres an example of the kind of content the Coupe website could include: http://www.challengers101.com/ChProjHome.html That website is developed and maintained by a committee of about a dozen volunteers who develop (and solicit) content and mutually edit the content for quality. The owners of Ercoupes tend to be in a lower financial range than owners of Bonanzas, RVs and even maybe 172s. Weve long tried to have low-cost housing and such as criteria for the EOC National Convention. Even so, its a big financial thing to make a long cross country trip to a national convention and not everyone can do it. The subset of those who can do it every year is pretty small. Its sad that the club is in decline when the popularity of the plane is riding high due to LSA/SP. But, its certain that the club could be reinvigorated without raising the dues. Ed Burkhead http://edburkhead.com/Ercoupe/index.htm East Peoria, Illinois ed -at- edburk???head.??com (remove the ? marks and change -at- to @)
