Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 5, 1990                   TAG: 9003051943
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Press
DATELINE: PLAIN CITY, OHIO                                 LENGTH: Medium

SCHOOL BUS IS SPACESHIP IN ROADSIDE SOLAR SYSTEM

The sun, both the real one and Stutzman's model, rises across the road from Plainview Christian School, where he is principal and the kind of science teacher students tend to remember.

Stutzman, searching for a way to demonstrate scale and distance when teaching about the universe, went to his wife's button box and a local metal shop to bring his ideas home.

He laid out his own scaled-down solar system over 7.4 miles of county roads. One inch equals 7,920 miles - the diameter of the Earth.

"That number is easy to remember, and it gives them a perspective on all of the distances," Stutzman said. "I've made scale models before in classrooms, and I've also made charts to show the distances. I tried to figure out a way to do both for a couple of years.

"I don't know where the inspiration came from. It just popped in my mind one day that this would be a way to do it."

He fashioned the sun by bending a 28-foot, 7-inch metal rod into a circle.

By contrast, Mercury is a shirt button; the moon a snap fastener; the Earth a slice of dowel the circumference of a broom handle. Jupiter, the largest planet, is a wooden sphere the size of a softball.

Each planet is nailed, with its name, to its own wooden post. It brings to mind the way Burma Shave might have done its advertising, asteroid to asteroid, had Martians been subject to 5 o'clock shadow:

Have spaceship

Will travel

Make Earth folks

Unravel

Burma Shave

"I've had the students walk down to where Mars is located," he said. "That's about a quarter of a mile. Then we went back to the school and got the kids in a bus. The bus was our spaceship for our tour of the solar system. In reality, the distance is so vast it blows your mind."

"I scaled the distances out on county and township maps," he said. "Of course, the planets are never lined up this much. If they come at all close, the superstitious people get all shook up and think something is going to happen."

Had Stutzman doubled his scale, it would be 15 miles back to the school. He has found 7.4 to be more than enough.

"The planets are farther apart as you go away from the sun," he said. "You finally start to wonder, `Where in the world is Pluto?"'

It's out there, somewhere.