To all of our Ohio WIX buddies,

[jaybird]

With all due respect colonel, will your book be more grammatically correct than your 321 posts?

[RMAllnutt]

Hi Rob,
He's listed in the phone-book for Newbury Ohio... I looked him up about seven years ago. I went to his place a couple of times, and interviewed him on video... very informally. Unfortunately these days, his wife usually answers the phone, and she is very guarded about who he talks to. I tried two years ago, the last time I went to the air racing symposium, but she quickly shut down the idea of me visiting. Your best bet actually is to go to next years air racing symposium, as he usually attends. Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Richard

[Randy Haskin]

Could you send me the link to the directions how to get to Walts place. I might just atke a weekend and fly over and try to talk with him.

With your last visit do you think he would be open to me using a tape recorder to interview him.

Rob, I've since lost the actual set of directions I used to get there, but I obtained them from a rec.aviation.military post, so a hour on Google ought to yield you some useable results.

As far as an interview...as you can see from my writeup, Mr Soplata is a very "interesting" individual. On one hand he has an unbelievable memory when it comes to the histories of his airplanes, how he got them, and how much he paid. On the other hand, some of the things he says are completely off-the-wall, like how he was planning on putting all of his airplanes back together all by himself. He even told me a story about how he'd been visited by the ghost of the deceased Blue Angel pilot of his F11-F and been given "permission" to posess the wreckage.

Bottom line, Rob, while I'm sure you might get some real gems in an interview, you'd be treated to a lot of chaff, too.

I also did not get the impression that he cared about any publicity, cared at all about securing his place in aviation history, etc etc. I doubt he'd be interested.

That being said...it's sure as hell worth a try. He didn't want to show me a darn thing initially when I visited. I just happened to mention that I flew jets in the AF, and apparently his son is or was both a USAF pilot as well as a pilot for FedEx. Once that was out on the table, he was more than willing to talk -- so perhaps there's a way in, after all.

[Scott Rose]

Via Randy Haskin

[O.P.]

Via Randy Haskin

Thanks Randy! Thanks Scott! I can't get enough of those pictures. It's like getting a sneak peak at King Tut's tomb. I know this might be BS, or maybe counter productive for Walter, But I would love to see a Walt Only picture section on the WRG registry. A cool person just showed me somemore great Walt pics that would be really cool to see there also....Just thinkin,it kinda hurts,need beer...

[mrhenniger]

Don't forget to check out the downloads section for a list of the Soplata inventory. If anyone can help to provide some ID info please let me know. For example the IDs of the Avengers are somewhat of a mystery.

Mike