Before Brown Arch, The Blue Arch At Oshkosh 1971 - Nostalgic Picture!
Friday, December 6, 2013 at 08:41AM 
(click pic to enlarge) The humble blue arch at the flightline entrance from Oshkosh 1971
This pic from my old picture album is what I remember the main gate to the flightline at Oshkosh looking like back in the really old days. 1971 was the second year for Oshkosh (before that the event was in Rockford, IL) and for the first many years of the week-long fly-in and convention, access to the flightline was restricted to keep the general public away from the airplanes. That's why an 'entrance' was needed there in the first place. In this CoolPix image from a post back in 2010 you can see a neat old picture of Ray Hegy's El Chuparosa homebuilt and that flightline fence. Those were some great old days!
The blue entrance in the pic above looks to be in the spot just south of where the brown arch is these days, which means it's a current motorized vehicle access point to the flightline. But in 1971 this was the big entrance! After the main entrance moved a few feet north sometime later to the current brown arch spot, it served as the restricted access entry point for many more years... but when the access restriction was lifted, the brown arch became a symbol of the past. Today it's a memorial to the legacy of the event.
I was I had a lot more of the pictures that my dad and I took back in the early days of Oshkosh, but most of them were lost in some water damage years ago. I was only 10 years old when this picture was taken, but it was already my third trip to an EAA convention. Oshkosh 2014 will be getting me pretty close to my 40th convention! I still get just as excited as I did when I was a kid : )
If you haven't been to Oshkosh in a while (or ever), then I'd like to suggest that now is a great time to start making plans to make it happen. It's the greatest aviation event in the world, and you should be there!
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