A famous biplane that once graced the cover of a popular aviation magazine has landed in a new Wyoming home, where it’s going to play a starring role in a new restaurant.
The Hatz biplane is called the Tizzy Lish, and the vintage aircraft was the 1986 Grand Champion at an annual vintage air show competition held in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, since 1971. That landed it on the cover of Sport Aviation.
“The man who built it is pretty proud of it,” the plane’s owner Stacy Bair told Cowboy State Daily. “And he was honored that it’s going to be preserved in time.”
The airplane is going to keep its historic name, which hearkens back to an old-time radio show popular during the 1930s and 1940s.
The radio show featured a guy named Bill Comstock, who dressed up as a female hostess named Tizzie Lish. The zany hostess was among the characters on the national “Al Pearce and His Gang” show.
The character parodied a “typical” old maid of the time — gossipy and gawky, coy and romantic, with a high-pitched giggle and no end of terrible recipes that Comstock would exhort readers to write down in a ridiculously high falsetto voice.
“Good morning, folks, are you ready for lots of goodies?” Comstock would ask at the beginning of his appearances.
The character became so popular, Comstock would get gifts for Tizzy, ranging from valentines to silk stockings, expensive furs and jewelry. And at least a dozen marriage proposals.
Regardless of how many cool garments Comstock received, he always wore the same getup — a tight-fitting skirt, with a dark hat, brown cotton stockings and a pair of brown drop earrings. The ensemble was completed with a ridiculous feather boa — once white — but never cleaned, so that it became quite dingy.
“I actually found (the show) where you can kind of listen to the song, but the character on this radio show is like, thought to be kind of beautiful, but kind of crazy,” Bair said. “And this is actually where the term ‘throw a tizzy’ comes from.”
Going A Miracle Mile Or Two
Rick Hansen built the biplane in the 1980s and showed it off at the 1986 vintage airshow in Oshkosh, taking home the grand champion prize and inspiring others to restore and build their own 1960s era Hatz CB-1 biplanes.
The planes are named after John Hatz, who designed them as a smaller version of the Waco F series biplanes for amateur construction.
Hansen called his plane the Tizzy Lish because his father would often call his daughter-in-law, and Hansen’s wife, Tizzy.
“In a nutshell, he thought she was a beautiful woman, but a little crazy,” Bair said.
The plane Hansen built was still airworthy, so the Bairs hired a pilot to fly the plane to Wyoming. This is where the story gets a bit crazy, and a bit miraculous.
“That pilot had one heck of an adventure,” Bair said. “But so, the plane is an open cockpit, so think Snoopy and the Red Baron.”
The plane was coming from Florida and had to stop every two hours for fuel, Bair said.
“So, he was just plopping his way across the states,” she said. “And then he gets to Texas and all of those tornadoes hit.”
That forced the pilot to find a hangar where he could hunker down a couple of days and wait for the storms to pass.
“After that, he gets back in the plane and takes off, and when he gets over Amarillo, Texas, the carburetor comes out of the plane,” Bair said.
In The Cornfield
He and a copilot were able to quickly decide on a safe spot to land.
Well, sort of safe.
“The pilot told me it came down to a matter of seconds,” Bair said. “If they hadn’t made the decision to turn the direction they needed to within those two seconds, it could have been a much, much different story.”
The “safe” spot they landed on was a highway in Texas, with all kinds of cars whizzing by.
“The project manager who works for my construction company that kind of handles all of this said he’s talking to the pilot who is on the road, and he can hear cars going by and he’s like, ‘Wow, you really are just on the side of the road, aren’t you?’”
The pilots pulled the plane off into a nearby cornfield as quickly as they could to get it off the highway, then placed a note on the plane identifying themselves and apologizing for leaving the plane in the cornfield.
Later that night, Bair got a message from someone named Leon on Facebook, asking if the plane belonged to her and, if so, why was it left in the cornfield.
Wind, it turned out, had blown the pilot’s note away, but the plane was registered to Bair, enabling authorities to find her.
“I ended up making friends with this guy named Leon, who kind of helped us through the process of finding the carburetor piece they needed to replace and getting it out of Amarillo.”
The pilot had flown back to Miami because of other obligations, but once the plane was airworthy again, he came back out to test fly the plane. Once it passed inspection, the pilot then brought it all the way home to Lovell.
“By a miracle, the plane arrived intact and beautiful,” Bair said.
Celebrating Local Lore And Music
The biplane’s eventual home will be the bar area of a new restaurant Bair and her husband Devin are building in Lovell. It will be called The Overlook.
The name doesn’t come from the Stephen King cult classic “The Shining,” whose setting was the creepy Overlook Hotel, though Bair suggested she’s not opposed to including some fun novel-inspired memorabilia.
Instead, the name comes from a popular spot in Devil’s Canyon that locals call The Overlook.
“It’s one of the best spots to stand and see the canyon,” Bair said. “So, it’s an homage to Devil’s Canyon Overlook.”
The restaurant will celebrate boating, rafting and kayaking the Big Horn Canyon, Bair said, and will feature photographs of the canyon from that vantage point.
The bar, however, will be aviation-themed and celebrate aerial views of the canyon.
“We’re actually trying to concoct a way to get a picture of this biplane over the canyon,” Bair said. “That will take probably a helicopter or another plane, or a drone. But there’s a lot of logistics around that, so we’re kind of still working on that, but we’d really love a picture of the canyon with that plane above it.”
The restaurant will also draw on local lore and legends for the names of its cocktails and menu items, celebrating the things Bair believes make Lovell a great place to live, and the only place she wants to call home.
“The recreation we have here is just to die for,” Bair said. “You know we’ve got the canyon, we’ve got the Pryor’s (wild horses), we’ve got fishing — we’ve kind of got it all. And the community itself is, I mean, it’s safe. People are kind. Everybody watches out for everybody else’s kids. You really couldn’t ask for a better community to want to invest in.”
Bair said she left Lovell when she was 18 and lived in California for about 12 years. She returned in about 2005, having decided that Lovell is really where her heart is.
Lovell’s chamber of commerce has identified more dining options as among resources needed to encourage more tourism in the town. Bair said that’s something she wants to help with.
Staffing issues may be a challenge, Bair said, and the low population adds an extra layer of complexity for a restaurant, which typically operates on thin margins and requires high traffic to break even.
Those things may not “bode well for what we’re trying to do,” Bair said. “But our heart's in it, and we know that the community will benefit from it.”
Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
