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| The PBY Catalina International Association's News Letter |
1st Edition |
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A CLOSING COMMENT: Something of significant concern within the reality of life is that "Birth Is A Fatal Disease" and most of us in the PBY community are in the advanced state of this disease! A discourse into morbidity is not the intent of this vignette, but to redirect attention to an optimist's creed: "Keep Your Eye Upon The Donut and Not Within The Hole"! Then follow with this popular commercial creed: "Go For All The Gusto You Can Get"! Is there a point to this trivia? Yes! and the point is this: The PBY Catalina International Association is scarcely over a year old and yet it has exploded in membership. It is a membership that does not embrace rank or other forms of "Pecking Order", aside from assigned membership responsibilities within the realm of talent or willingness to contribute. This membership does offer camaraderie and other forms of pleasant sociability to enhance the virtues of our past to the direction of the present and future. Fortunately there have been other Catalina associations that have maintained specific affiliation gatherings. The associations, we should interact with on a positive course. It may be that through this interaction some of our members and theirs may find a long lost friend or perhaps locate an active association of his old favorite organization he had lost touch with. In another perspective, the diversification of an internationally-oriented association such as ours may provide a longer-lasting unity within the worldwide PBY community. Albeit that the military element to the civilian sector is much larger, but the hands of all PBY/PBN/CANSO/ETC. personnel are within the Catalina community for a grasp of camaraderie and exchange of interests and the maintenance of the role these wonderful aircraft played in history. It is worth a pledge to ourselves to maintain vitality for some inexplicable reason that so many of us still cherish that "material machine" referred to by both official identification and such vernaculars as "Yoke-Boat", "Black-Cat", "Dumbo" among others, or is it from "guilt" and "reverence" that we are here and our lost crewmen are not.
At the Banquet
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