Jim Keeshen

I have two passions in life: aviation and animation. My father instilled both of these subjects in me and my brother.

Aviation - Dad was a B-25 pilot during WWII in North Africa and later on flew DC-3s for Texaco in South America. As kids we were always hanging around airports and visiting with his fellow bush pilots. Dad was also an avid builder of model airplanes and was among the first when RC airplanes started up. My brother and I acquired the building and flying bug. I enjoy building plastic models, rubber powered stick-and-tissue airplanes, and large RC models as well.

Our family has quite a collection of all the above types but about 25 years ago I started collecting factory display models, specifically one-of-a-kind proposal models made by all the different aircraft manufacturers during the Cold War.

Eventually I found a very small group of avid collectors in this specialized category who all feel the same way about the uniqueness and the untold history of these models. We feel that these proposal models are unknown artifacts of the aerospace industry, worth their weight in gold, and because most were done in secrecy very few are familiar with them. Thus this book, US SECRET PROJECTS OF THE COLD WAR, came about.

We have many more models to show but lets see how this book does before we consider VOLUME II.

More to come . . .