The Riverside Telescope Makers Conference was founded by Clifford W. Holmes and the Riverside Astronomical Society in 1969. For its first four years, the RTMC was held at Riverside Community College. By 1973, the conference had outgrown those facilities and moved to the mountain community of Idyllwild for the 5th and 6th conferences.

Finally, in 1975, the RTMC found a permanent home at its present location of Camp Oakes near Big Bear in the San Bernardino Mountains. Camp Oakes is conveniently located within driving distance of all of Southern California and within a day's drive of most of the Western United States.

The links on the left side of the page lead to recaps of past conferences. Pages will become active as we find the time to put them up. Letting 30 years go by before attempting to document properly our history lets us realize how far and wide the information gets scattered. Up until now, there was no central depository for historical information. Some pictures and other information were found in the files of the late Clifford Holmes (thanks Jackie!). Some information was found in old issues of Sky & Telescope and Astronomy magazines. The proceedings published by John Sanford and the Orange County Astronomers during the 1980's yielded a wealth of information about those conferences. Magazines such as Amateur Astronomy, Telescope Making, and Amateur Telescope Making yielded useful articles. Randall Wilcox contributed a lot of facts, organized and scanned pictures, and contributed the whole Merit Award Archive from 1984 through 1999. The rest came from my pictures and files. Many thanks to Ashley McDermott who claims he went out into his storage shed in 105-degree heat to retrieve old Sky & Telescopes and other archival materials (although nobody witnessed this feat, and Pat is staying silent on the subject). Also, many thanks to Steve Edberg who really did get up on a foot with a broken toe to dig through his archival materials. He is known to never throw anything away (The City of La Canada wants him to get a landfill permit). Finally, many thanks to Alson Wong who suffered through endless hours of our scanning pictures with his slide scanner.

This is still a work in progress (and likely always will be). Some information has been lost to time. So, if you are hoarding information, old programs, photos, articles, etc., for years that are sketchy or non-existent, we would be forever grateful if you could send a copy of it to:

Riverside Telescope Makers Conference, Inc.
8300 Utica Avenue, Suite 105
Rancho Cucamonga, CA 91730

Robert Stephens