airplane

The story of model airplane pioneers Victor and Joe Stanzel is a heartwarming saga about two reserved rural Texas bachelor brothers. Against all odds, they built a 20th-century business that flourished for 70 years on nothing but ambition, creativity and hard work.

model t
Victor was in the back seat of his father’s Model T, while his younger brothers, Joe and Reinhart (left to right, respectively), sat up front with their father, Edward Stanzel Sr., who died in 1918 shortly after this photo was taken. 

On a Wing and a Prayer

The sons of Austrian immigrants, Victor, Joe and a third brother, Reinhart, spoke German before they learned English at St. Rose Catholic School. Victor, the older brother and the inventor, left school after the 10th grade to help provide for his widowed mother and two younger brothers.

Walking behind the mule pulling the plow in his Uncle Ferd’s fields, Victor admired how effortlessly birds flew and gracefully banked. The rare aircraft he saw overhead were U.S. Army Air Force planes from San Antonio.

This inspired him, but lots of farm boys had dreams. However, not many of them came true.

Victor got his hands on some simple construction plans for a model airplane. They didn’t work well, but he built a model, which fed his lifelong fascination with flight.

But the Stanzels and their extended family were farmers. They had neither experience in commerce nor deep pockets to fund research and development or contacts beyond the folks in their hometown.

schulenburg
In 1930, with a population of 1,604, Schulenburg, Texas, was the hub of a farming community. Cotton and corn were the primary crops. The closest airports were 100-plus miles away, with San Antonio to the west and Houston to the east. 

Come Fly With Me

Agnes Stanzel encouraged her oldest son’s ambitions. Therefore, Victor spent his limited funds on technical correspondence courses in subjects such as drafting, mechanical drawing, physics, and practical mathematics. 

airplane
Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis was the first true-scale model that Victor hand-carved from balsa wood in the family’s garage.

Victor’s meticulous attention to detail paid off and soon he was creating true-scale models of commercial airplanes with his own two hands. When displayed in the window of a blueprint shop in San Antonio, the models were readily sold to flyers familiar with the various aircraft. They were not only accurate depictions of the planes but also beautifully handcrafted.

Construct-your-own kits

By 1932, Victor’s was producing kits for model airplane enthusiasts to build at home. He advertised products he’d designed such as the solid Gee-Bee Sportster and the Gee-Bee Super Sportster in popular trade magazines like Popular Aviation and Aero Digest. Orders poured in through the U.S. Mail and Stanzel kits were shipped to satisfied customers throughout the country.

While Victor had competition, his impeccable workmanship gave his enterprise, Victor Stanzel & Co., a competitive edge.

model airplane
model airplane 2
Building model airplanes from kits was a popular
pastime for adults and youngsters prior to World War II.

Victor’s youngest brother, Joe, was also interested in flight, too, but Victor urged him to earn his high school diploma. There would be plenty of time for the brothers to team up for more than weekend collaboration. Victor was right about that.

With a growing market and a reputation to match, it was time for Victor to move out of the family garage and into the first Stanzel factory.

victor's factory
Constructed in 1935, Victor’s first factory building was a short distance from the Stanzel’s house. Victor walked home to have lunch with his mother each day.
model airplane 3
With a growing mail-order business, Victor sought competent help. The best-qualified man for the job was a young woman who had attended a San Antonio business school. Sophie Muehlstein joined the Stanzel brothers and worked for them for the rest of her life. She was an integral part of their success.
kid e plane
Bernice Kahlich Havel (left) and her friend, Anna Marie Guenther (right), felt privileged to ride in Victor’s 1936 invention. However, the Kid-E-Plane they are pictured trying out was never produced commercially.

Giving Amusement Rides a Spin

Victor decided that building airplane amusement park rides was worth a try. His designs were intriguing and the prototypes operated just fine. Because they couldn’t accommodate many passengers at one time, the rides were unprofitable for amusement park operators. Therefore, the demand for Stanzel’s innovative rides never took off.

stratoship
Victor’s StratoShip ride was a hit with patrons at the 1936 Texas State Fair; nevertheless, it was not a commercial success.

Joe Joins the Business

When Joe graduated from Schulenburg High School in 1934, Victor was happy. He knew that anything he could dream up Joe could build. His younger brother had natural engineering talents and shared Victor’s passion for quality and ingenuity.

Victor and Joe’s unwritten motto was, “Do it right and you can’t go wrong.”

When the U.S. entered World War II, Victor and Joe both entered full-time ‘war work’ at Duncan Field in San Antonio, a division of the U.S. Army Air Corps at Kelly Field.

During World War II, Victor was a U.S. Army Air Force instructor in the drafting engineering department at Duncan Field in San Antonio. Joe worked in the personnel training unit at the same location.

During the war years, Joe seized the opportunity to take courses from the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas School of Engineering. 

Meanwhile, back in Schulenburg, Sophie was keeping Victor Stanzel & Co. afloat with the help of another young woman named Laura Berger.

victor stanzel
Born in 1910, Victor Stanzel was the eldest.
joe stanzel
Joe Stanzel, Victor’s youngest brother, was born in 1916.

Post-war Prosperity

After the war, Victor and Joe discontinued the mail-order business. Instead, the brothers produced gas-powered free-flying model aircraft and ready-to-assemble model airplane kits. Distributors sold Stanzel kits and models to hobby stores and other retailers.

In that era, Victor and Joe devised a way to use plastic rather than balsa wood to build their products. That was a turning point in the company’s development. 

Much of the workforce in the factory was comprised of local women with children in school, who were eager to earn a minimum wage salary. At the end of each summer, hiring ramped up as the model toymaker added extra employees to the assembly line. There were huge orders to fill for the Christmas shopping season.

The Stanzels expanded their factory space two more times to accommodate the growth in their business.

Victor Stanzel & Co. products provided hours of active, outdoor fun.

A 1950s Stanzel invention still used in the competitive model airplane flying world today is Mono-Line, a single line attached to an aircraft.

mono line airplane
airplane trip
In a bold marketing campaign, the Stanzels hired model airplane enthusiast Joe Kirn (left) and sales representative Bill Murray (center) to undertake an ambitious 80,000-mile road trip. Their mission was to promote the Stanzels’ Mono-Line product. (Joe Stanzel is pictured at right.)    

To market their models and introduce new ones that further enhanced the company’s reputation, Victor and Joe continued to advertise and attend industry toy fairs. They were not natural-born promoters. However, they were so proud and excited about their inventions that they overcame their reserved natures to market them successfully.

However, the two brothers spent most of their time in the Schulenburg factory. Victor would likely be found in his upstairs office perfecting new ideas. Joe was on the factory floor keeping an eye on the manufacturing while simultaneously masterminding how new additions to their model airplane line would be produced.

Without fail, Victor and Joe now both walked home at noon to have lunch with their mother.

electromic flash
At a hobby trade show in 1958, Victor and Joe introduced the Electromic Flash, the first of Stanzel’s innovative ready-to-fly toys. That’s when the Stanzels’ business began soaring to new heights.
electromic flash poster
The Electromic Flash, which sold for $2.98, was a huge success because it came ready to take outdoors and fly. No assembly was required.
freight cars
Long gone were the days when the Stanzel brothers mailed model airplane kits to customers through the Schulenburg post office. The company’s shipping department began loading railway freight cars bound for major retailers like K-Mart and Walmart.
electromic jet poster
Multi-talented Victor also designed the graphics for the magazine advertising and toy model airplane boxes. His equally clever brother, Joe, printed many of those eye-catching pieces in-house.

Big Business in a Small Town

At the height of production, Victor Stanzel & Co., (which eventually incorporated as Victor Stanzel Co.), had 120 workers busy in the factory. In one day, they assembled 1,000 battery-powered toy airplanes, likely a production record.

stanzel worker
A loyal Stanzel workforce assembled model airplane parts manufactured on-site.

Victor and Joe were self-educated workaholics, who have 28 U.S. patents to their credit, as well as five additional patents in foreign countries. In the Stanzels’ ready-to-fly product line alone, they designed, built and marketed 75 different products. These ranged from the Electromic Lunar Bug to the Shooting Star and the Electromic Lil’ Rascal to the Mimi Jet Dart.

It’s also interesting that, according to former employees and family members, Victor and Joe never raised their voices. Nor were they ever heard of uttering a curse word despite the pressures they faced.  

The brothers were inducted into the Academy of Model Aeronautics Model Aviation Hall of Fame in 1988 for their contributions to the industry.

End of an era

But over time, the public began changing how it spent its leisure time. Computer games became more popular and flying toy airplanes outdoors lost its allure. Independent hobby shops closed their doors. A flood of cheap imports from foreign countries also contributed to the eventual erosion of Victor Stanzel Co. business.

Joe died of a brain tumor in 1990. Ted Stanzel, a retired geologist, returned to Schulenburg to help his uncle Victor. But by that time, the handwriting was on the wall. The business was no longer profitable.

Victor died in 1997 at the age of 87 and the sad task of closing down Victor Stanzel Co. fell to Ted. However, the Stanzel’s commitment to Schulenburg by no means ended.

Before his death, Victor was instrumental in establishing the Stanzel Family Foundation. It operates a museum dedicated to the inventors and the model airplane company’s achievements. It also administers ongoing programs that offer educational opportunities for youth such as scholarships. In addition, it focuses on enhancing the health and well-being of Schulenburg and nearby Weimar community members.

Learn more about the Stanzel Model Aircraft Museum by clicking the button below:

victor and joe factory building
Victor and Joe Stanzel’s story comes to life in the Stanzel Model Aircraft Museum. Full-size figures of the brothers collaborating on a design in the factory building.

At the request of the Stanzel Family Foundation, I worked with Ted Stanzel to gather the stories from those who worked for Victor Stanzel Co. We also traced the progress of the Stanzel business and family. Our collaborative effort, Defying Gravity, How Victor and Joe Stanzel’s Dream Took Flight, was published in the spring 0f 2021.

Through conducting interviews for the Stanzel book and sifting through the wonderful collection of photos and memorabilia, I was reminded that dreams can be realized. I regret that I never met Victor and Joe Stanzel, but feel fortunate to have had a hand in keeping their story alive.

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Readers, did you or someone in your family ever fly a model airplane?

You might also enjoy some of my other posts about rural Texas life:

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Elaine Thomas
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