Remembering motor inventor for model airplanes

history columnFrances Righter Tucker was just 3 or 4 years old, barely able to sit on a stool, when she began helping her father, Walter Righter, work on miniature airplane engines in his backyard shop on Watson Street.

“My mother would say, ‘go out to the shop and see what Daddy is doing,’ ” recalled Tucker. “One day, he was really concentrating. He was working at his bench calculating sizes. He pulled out a stool, picked me up, reached over to get all those small pieces and parts of engines, slid them over to me and showed me how they fit together. Then he told me to try to put it together, but, he said, ‘don’t talk to me until you think you have it all together.’ ”

That was the beginning of Tucker’s collaboration with her father. As a young girl, she sorted and organized parts. Later, after she married, she worked as his secretary.

Righter, an engineer, graduated from Caltech in 1928 and worked at Kinner Airplane and Motor Corp., at Grand Central Airport for several years before starting his own business in his backyard in 1936.

“During the Depression, things were really tough,” recalled Tucker. “He came home one day with a big drafting board, put it in the dining room and drew his first design. He took that design to Reginald Denny, a famous actor who had been a pilot in World War I. He had a hobby shop in Hollywood and was looking for a reliable miniature airplane engine for model airplanes.”

Denny selected Righter’s design and named it the Dennymite. It was the first motor for model airplanes.

“Now all the boys could fly their planes with an engine,” Tucker said.

Later, her father and Ken Case developed the first remote control for the model airplanes and also for toy cars.

“Dad never put his name on them. My mother was upset because everything was ‘done by Reg’ but he [Denny] had the connections and he could get the publicity. So everyone, all the boys in my class, knew about the Dennymites and knew they could go to Denny’s shop and buy them, but didn’t know who made them. No one has known about it until now that I’m putting it on a website.”

Righter produced some 10,000 Dennymites for Reginald Denny Industries, according to the Righter website.

Righter moved his business to San Fernando Road in 1937. He also worked on projects (including the Spruce Goose and the P-47 Thunderbolt) for Howard Hughes and designed and built Radioplane target drones for the military.

Tucker recalled that “if the phone would ring, it could be the Pentagon, Howard Hughes or Lockheed.”

The Radioplane was assembled in Van Nuys. One assembler on the line was Norma Jean Dougherty, later to become known as Marilyn Monroe.

An Army photographer, sent to the factory to take pictures of women war workers, noticed her, took her picture and persuaded her to model for more photos that were soon circulating in Hollywood.

Righter lived on Watson Street for 41 years and later moved to Santa Ana.

There he continued to work in a shop, again in his backyard, until his death in 1982.

* KATHERINE YAMADA’S column runs every other Friday. To contact her, call features editor Joyce Rudolph at 637-3241. For more information on Glendale’s history visit the Glendale Historical Society’s web page: www.glendalehistorical.org; call the reference desk at the Central Library at (818) 548-2027; or visit the Special Collections Room at Central (open by appointment only).

Note to Readers: Tommene and Richard Gohl, who now live in the house once owned by the Righters, put me in touch with Frances Righter Tucker. Tucker invited me to visit her La Cañada Flintridge home and showed me many projects her father had worked on.