"Soaring for Diamonds" review

ISBN 0-87358-104-0

Soaring for Diamonds
Flying for the Highest International Flying Emblem

By Joseph Colville Lincoln

The year was 1978 and a friend of mine told me about a job that he was doing after school. I had never had a real job before and well, this friend of mine was a skateboarder like myself and if they had hired him, long hair and all, then they would probably hire me. The little out of the way place was called "Glassart" in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was a stained glass studio that made commercial and residential stained glass windows. I told them that my friend worked there and they brought me around to the different stations in the shop and told me that I could have the job if I wanted. The pay was minimum wage but the hours I could make on my own up to around 6p when the last full time guy went home.

My occupation was full time skateboarder with interests in surfing (snow and ocean) and my parents had just bought me my first hang glider. I was quickly inducted into the art of making industrial sized stained glass panels. One panel was 3' by 4' or so, weighed about 40 pounds, one inch thick (epoxy matrix) with different colored stained glass blocks that were cut out by a diamond bladed lapidary/mason saw. Each piece of glass took a few minutes to cut and there were anywhere from zero to 100 pieces per panel. A big window could have thirty or so panels all connected together with iron frame work so you get the idea. Lots of work at the saw, zoning out with earphones on with Black Sabbath cranked up high to drown out the screaming of the diamond blade cutting into glass.



I helped build and install many projects around Phoenix in the late 70's and had no idea that Joe had passed away from a brain tumor or what he or his family stood for. There were no photographs of gliders in the shop, nothing that would have keyed me into his other life. I just know that somewhere in the mid 80's when I learned to soar my hang glider in Makapuu, O'ahu Hawaii, I would go to the library and search out good reading on the subject where on hang gliding, there was none so I looked to sailplanes for books and there it was, all the flights in Arizona and the references to Glassart, Joe's studio and I put the two together.

I had been working for a Arizona soaring champion's business, I never knew. To this day I feel it is or was my destiny to be linked in some small way to this person.

Soaring for Diamonds is a wonderfully written piece on the beauty of soaring flight and the pursuit of the highest accolades in it's organization...

The chapter list includes:

1. First Flight
2. Solo
3. What Keeps Them Up?
4. Silver C
5. Back to Arizona
6. Cirro-Q
7. A Naitonal Soaring Contest at Elmira
8. The Crash of the HP-7
9. Beyond the Caanadian River
10. My Golden C
11. Tombstone
12. Mountain Soaring at Bishop
13. Another Diamond Try
14. Across the Continental Divide
15. The Great Climb
16. Record Soaring Camp at Odessa
17. Flight to Esperanza

By the same author: On Quiet Wings, Soaring on the Wind, The Windows of Trinity Cathedral

In memorandum: Reflections of Joseph C. Lincoln