Your Incredible Neighbors: MASTER MECHANIC

GV dabbler keeps dad’s legacy alive

A tinkerer, a tradesman, a dabbler, a designer — Bob Orr doesn’t call himself any of these, though he’s probably all of them.

“I like converting,” the Green Valley man said as he explained why he’d rather turn a Weed Wacker motor into a model airplane engine than buy the kit.

His father, Glen, who founded the oldest skin-diving club in America, knew Bob was going to take after him when he came home from work to find his 11 year old had torn an outboard engine apart and put it back together.

“If it blows up, you’re in trouble,” he remembers his dad warning him.

It didn’t.

After careers as a truck driver and motorcycle mechanic, service manager and engine builder, Orr, 70, retired from the General Dynamics aerospace division in San Diego in ‘94 and moved to Green Valley, where he can be found either at Valley Golf Cars, on his Harley, at the model plane airstrip, or hunched over the workshop in his garage.

Right now, he’s rebuilding his late father’s 1932 Indian motorcycle. Bob got it back from a car dealer friend of his dad’s in San Diego who had taken it in trade and held onto it. Glen, who died in 1971, bought it in ‘64 for $650, and his son estimates its worth when he’s finished at $30,000-$40,000.

It’s not the money, though, that motivates this guy, as anyone can see when you ask him what he’s going to do with the bike when it’s done.

“Ride it,” he declared without looking up from his workbench.

He still keeps the article, “Orr’s Fours,” from the 1969 edition of Motorcyclist that described his father’s collection of Indian bikes and the many solo road trips he took on them across the West.

A man of many talents and very few words, Bob (no relation to Bobby) Orr does most of the engine work for Valley Golf Cars when he isn’t building and flying air models, something he’s been into since he was a kid.

Eight of the 15 one-fourth scale beauties he’s built since he retired hang from the ceiling in his garage, and as a TIMPA (Tucson International Modelplex Association) Board member, he knows a little bit about how to fly them.

A regular with the Green Valley R/C Flyers, who put their models to the test at three different fields in the area, Orr has helped TIMPA with their involvement in the Tucson Aerobatic Shootout that brings aficionados in from 10 different countries to show off their 3-D flying skills for more than $100,000 in prize money.

Models vary in size, with 50 percent of scale the largest, and Orr estimates it takes him six months to a year to build a one-fourth scale model. He’s currently linking two separate Weed Wacker motors together into a new 30 percent model.

“I enjoy building them as much as flying them.”

Orr started out on model gliders as a kid, flying them at Torrey Pines for nearly 20 years.

Then in ‘73, he took his first ride in a real glider and immediately signed up for flying school at Borderline Airsports in Chula Vista.

“I couldn’t afford to fly,” he remembered, “so I got my instructor rating.”

With money he earned instructing on weekends, he bought his first glider in ‘78, and flew for 10 years in competitions over the Mohave Desert with plenty of forced landings and close calls, losing four friends over that period.

“You took chances you normally wouldn’t take,” he said.

Flying models are safer, he would agree, though the free-spirited risk-taking was always there, passed along from a pioneering parent.

Father Glen was known in San Diego as the “Grand Exalted Walrus,” considered the father of skin diving there.

Before wetsuits, snorkels, or tanks, Glen Orr founded the “Bottom Scratchers” in 1933 with two other friends who started diving for seafood to feed their families during the Depression.

They created swim goggles from radiator hose and a ladies makeup compact, fashioned an underwater camera from a Kodak Baby Brownie with a metal box around it, and pioneered spear fishing and other underwater sports equipment, some of it borrowed by the studios when they worked as models for the old “Sea Hunt” television show.

Famous WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote about them, and they became part of San Diego history after a 1949 National Geographic article, some eventually diving with Jacques Cousteau.

Although he worked with some great racing teams, including the late “Forever Racer,” Don Vesco, famous for his Bonneville land speed records, Bob’s first love was, and still is, building and rebuilding, content in his workshop, doing the occasional metal work or welding for his neighbors, or putting together his next model plane motor.

And one day soon, his weekend biking buddies will crowd around him as he rides up on one of “Orr’s Fours.”

Mike Touzeau is a freelance writer.