LAURA JAMESON/THE EXPRESS Piper Aviation Museum Board President Ron Dremel, left, and Vice President and founder of the Sentimental Journey Fly-In Cal Arter, speak to local service clubs during a special meeting at the museum Thursday afternoon.

LOCK HAVEN — Local service clubs were treated to a crash course in the Piper Aviation Museum and Sentimental Journey Fly In’s history by two experts, one of whom helped get both off the ground.

Sentimental Journey founder and museum vice president, Cal Arter, and museum president, Ron Dremel, spoke during a special Lock Haven Kiwanis Club, held in the Aztec Room inside the museum this week.

The Kiwanis holds the meeting annually and invites organizations such as local Rotary Clubs, to hear from special guests about the aviation world — particularly Piper Aviation which was once headquartered feet away from the meeting space.

Arter, who was instrumental in ensuring the museum came to life from just a simple idea, spoke about its history and how it came to be. Arter previously was test pilot for Piper Aviation.

Arter said the idea for the museum came in 1984 when, during a special banquet with Piper Aviation distributors, he stood up and declared a museum would be built. The goal at the time he said was to have it inside of a mobile tractor trailer with plans of a more permanent location in the future.

He said the Pennsylvania Museum Commission donated a small tractor trailer which he and others took to community events in the area.

“The idea of the whole thing was to go to air shows, schools, all kinds of things just to get people interested in the future museum. Which I knew we were going to have. I had no idea how, where or what,” he said.

The museum would find another home inside a 42 foot-long trailer pulled by a Mac truck before the current building — then owned by diesel engine company Champion Parts — was put up for sale.

Prior to the sale, Arter said Piper Aviation — which by then moved its operations to Florida — were extremely supportive of the idea of a museum. They reinforced this by donating roughly a million dollars worth of convention displays and equipment which was transported by a plethora of volunteers, and even the National Guard, from a storage unit in Philadelphia.

With the opportunity to properly showcase these items finally available with the Champion Parts building, Arter said he went to lunch with William “Bill” Piper, Jr. to see about securing funding to make it happen.

“The building was $250,000 so we asked for $350,000,” he said. “(Bill Jr.) gave it to us out of the Piper Foundation, which was set up for education.”

The early museum board placed the funds into an endowment before securing a loan through Jersey Shore State Bank.

“Bill, Jr. also gave us a J2 (airplane),” he said. “Then we got to work to clean the building. It took us months and months and months of scrubbing to even bring anything in.”

Once the cleaning was complete and the J2 in place, Arter said his goal was to see nine more in the museum.

“I thought, boy oh boy if we can get 10 airplanes we’ve got one heck of a museum,” he said.

According to Dremel, the museum’s inventory of planes has increased far past Arter’s hopes.

“We’ve got a real problem. We’ve got a lot of airplanes and no room,” he said. “I even have two more airplanes coming in the next month or two. One-of-a-kind airplanes and there’s no room to put them.”

Among those is a first-customer Malibu.

“It was a one-owner airplane from 1984,” he said.

Dremel emphasized Piper’s continued support of the museum and its work to preserve the company’s history in Lock Haven.

“The management team there has been really into the history and they recognize us as THE Piper Aviation Museum,” he said. “Our job is to carry on the legacy of Piper.”

He noted Piper manufactured over 140,000 airplanes and its the museum board’s goal to have one of each type of plane to showcase.

“We’ve got a good start on that and that includes one-of-a-kind airplanes,” he said. “There’s just so much history here in Lock Haven and we’re looking to keep it alive and expand on it.”

This expansion includes a physical building that can better store planes.

Launched in 2025, Dremel said the museum has reached about 40 percent of its fundraising goal for the project with the potential for even more donations coming their way.

“We’ve already started the permitting process and are working on land-use permits and then building permits,” he said. “All that takes time but I’m hoping we can be in it this time next year if all goes well.”