Like most American boys of my class, locale and generation, I spent my middle childhood building models.  They supplemented ready-made toys and added an involvement—the act of creation—to a world defined by miniatures.  I commanded regiments of toy soldiers, cast-metal cars, stamped tin boats and planes that wound with a key, Made in Japan before Pearl Harbor.  I toted six-guns and carried rubber daggers.  I built villages of wooden ABC blocks, windmills from Tinkertoys and skeletal bridges from a Gilbert Erector Set.  From these activities to building scale models was not such a long jump.

            My brother, seven years older, was obsessed by elaborate plane kits—flying models with rubber-band power, made of thousands of balsa wood sticks and structural pieces carefully measured and cut, assembled with pins and intoxicating airplane glue, covered with fragile silkspan paper, painted with banana-reeking Testor’s dope.  I watched him work with wonder.  The hundreds of hours and infinite patience of the task were beyond me.  Too many skills with razor blade and Xacto knife, too many engineering and physics principles, too many subassemblies and too much forward planning for a grade-schooler.

            But I started on Strombecker solid models, small replicas of WW II warplanes, of precut white pine, sanded, glued together, finished and spackled with authenticating decalcomanias.  They were produced as quick-assemble spotter models for the military or civilian volunteers in civil defense.  They were usually stuck together casually, painted matte black or gray and hung from a ceiling with thread, studied as silhouettes in aircraft recognition exercises.  The models were a 3-D analogue to the Squadrons Scramble and other spotter cards printed with three-view silhouettes that in theory taught subliminal lessons to card-playing aircraft watchers.

            As a budding modeler, I took care, sanding and shaping the solid models carefully, using sanding sealer and painting them in prescribed warbird colors, finished by decals.  They hung from my bedroom ceiling, providing vivid and violent nocturnal images tiding me to dreamland.  The Strombecker Co. of Moline-Rock Island, Illinois, gifted me with the most indelible images of childhood and gave me an apprenticeship in model crafting skills.  An odd irony—in my first adult job, I worked indirectly for the Beckstroms (family name opposed to corporate handle) to write and design assembly instruction sheets for their final model line—small plastic car kits at the height of the slot-racing mania of the late 1950s and early ’60s.  My last tango in the world of models.

            As I developed basic skills, I tackled bigger, more complex solid models, usually vaguely pre-shaped balsa wood but requiring carving, cutting and sanding.  The balsa was tricky because it was soft, to be worked easily with small tools, but it was also fragile and easily damaged or deformed in construction.  I learned patience and care from handling it.  But my impulse in model-building was urgent.  I bought my kits at a combination hobby and sporting goods store, and I chose them for the colorful box art and a quick inspection of plans and components, to know I could meet the technical demands at my lowly stage of evolution.

            What I wanted was not the satisfaction of X hours’ steady work in a soothing rhythm but the finished model as depicted on the box and plans.  It was, say, a P61 Black Widow twin-engine night fighter, the coolest, most sinister plane built by the U.S. for WW II.  It was purpose-built to annihilate hordes of German heavy bombers that might hold Festung Europa till the crack of doom.  The box picture showed it as dead black against a night sky crisscrossed with antiaircraft spotlight beams, firing its mighty ordnance at a small victim in the distance, trailing flames from mortal damage.

            Seeing that lurid image, I wanted to have that P61 model finished, glossy with black dope and dotted with decals, lying in my hand like a trophy fish pulled from a stream.  I would then re-imagine the scene of the Black Widow boring in on some helpless Heinkel, hurling streams of .50 caliber, 20 mm. and .37 mm. bullets and shells across the German sky to obliterate those swastika-flaunting Gothic bastards!

            Driven by impatience and the need to hold a completed model, I missed the dreamy intoxication many kids described when they mentioned hours indoors slaving over tiny parts.  Other kids built models because they were lonely geeks, misfits or introverts, and models defined their private, tiny alternative universes.  I never fit that mold.  If the modeling craft was not an end in itself, it was also not an acceptable means of escapism.  The finished models inspired reverie or play, but I also wanted to play softball, ride my bicycle, go to the woods, build impromptu forts on vacant lots, see cheap movies on Saturdays.  Models were a sporadic sideline, not an occupation.

            Little working models fascinated me.  I had a tin boat bathtub toy, powered by a birthday cake candle creating steam that puffed from the stern.  It taught me about propulsion and physics.  Another boat toy was a windup submarine that could cruise either submerged or surfaced.  My brother bought a gasoline-powered cast metal Thimbledrome midget racer, which howled like Beelzebub and was virtually indestructible.  He passed it to me, and it was a prime show-off possession .  It was not exactly a model—no assembly required—but neither was it a “toy,” given its aura of danger and grown-upness.  It was a rainbow bridge from childhood to teenage status.

            I built a few flying models—the vast Cleveland kits were best but maddeningly detailed enough to thwart aircraft engineers—but found flying them a feeble substitute for imaginative adventure.  The experience produced more anxiety than joy.  In flight, stick models were fragile, erratic and not “real” in aerial behavior.  They were grabbed by zephyrs, soared stupidly up into trees, nose-dived into hard earth or disintegrated in flight from invisible stresses on the gossamer structures.  Rubber bands broke, landing gear collapsed, trim achieved by careful weighting caused stalls, spins or unnamable maneuvers causing total loss of the aircraft.  Boredom drove us to destroy flying models that survived accident, dousing them with Ronson lighter fluid and setting them ablaze for a terminal Gotterdammerung flight, preferably at dusk.

            Other models attracted me, and I was still working as the Age of Plastic began.  My first experience with the new miracle material (a legacy of WW II, promising a wholly plasticized world come Peacetime) was a small Testor’s kit, a Supermarine float racer ca. 1930 (ancestor of Britain’s great Spitfire and indirect progenitor of the Axis’s Mitsubishi Zero-sen and Messerschmitt Bf 109—the air war was a family feud or the fatal outcome of incest, like Greek tragedy).  From this kit I learned that plastic construction was trickier than it looked and that plastic glue was treacherous, etching every surface it touched and transferring gross fingerprints from slobs like me. 

            I wasn’t entranced by the possibilities and for the first time heard time’s winged chariot at my back.  I knew younger kids would grow up on plastic models, that it was a future not for me.  Plastic would dominate modeling, eliminating the cutting, shaping and sanding skills I acquired, and model builders would be assemblers with microscopic vision and the skills of a watchmaker.  Plastic kits guaranteed a flawless product (if you followed instructions faithfully) exactly like every kit built by every builder.  They reminded me of the GI suburbs erupting around the edges of town, vistas of National Homes or Lustron monocoques and other prefabs set on the web of curvilinear streets, gleaming like hard candies thrown by a careless giant. 

            Gradually, I left model building, with little feeling of loss or abandonment.  Other ideas and experiences beckoned, and I felt a shudder when I saw grown men deeply immersed in modeling—U-control planes or HO railroading or radio control cars and boats.  An insanity created the glossy perfection in a huge flying model of the 1931 GeeBee pylon racer or a complete replica of HMS Bounty, down to knotted shrouds and belaying pins.  Life was more than endlessly recreating reality in teeny, carefully scaled replicas, erecting a planned and controlled microcosm inside our big world.  An ancient embroidered motto hung for years in our living room:  The World Is So Full of a Number of Things/That We Should All Be As Happy As Kings.

            One day I went looking for that world, full-scale, not vacuum-extruded from styrene, and I never looked back. ###