Paul Howard Poberezny

He was born on September 14, 1921, in Leavenworth County, Kansas, not North Dakota, a mix-up that still turns up. He grew up poor in a Milwaukee tar-paper shack and taught himself to fly a rebuilt WACO glider at sixteen; his first solo was a car-towed launch that released around a hundred feet and settled into alfalfa.

In 1953, from a basement in Hales Corners, he started a homebuilders’ club that became the EAA. The fly-in outgrew Milwaukee, then Rockford, and in 1970 landed at Wittman Field. EAA AirVenture is now the world’s largest gathering of its kind: hundreds of thousands of people, thousands of airplanes, a city that appears and vanishes in a week. A 1955 Mechanix Illustrated series on the Baby Ace helped sell America on building airplanes at home; he also designed the Acro Sport and the Pober Pixie.

He flew more than five hundred types, logged some thirty thousand hours, and collected all seven U.S. military pilot ratings across thirty years in the Wisconsin Air National Guard and Air Force. Flying magazine ranked him No. 4 among its 51 Heroes of Aviation in 2013. His 1944 F-51D Mustang, Paul I, is at the EAA Aviation Museum. He died of cancer in Oshkosh on August 22, 2013, at ninety-one. The convention stayed.