THE HOBBY SHOP

The fact that you are reading these very words confirms you’ll know the subject of this month’s column. Perhaps it was a classic 1950s-style hobby shop located on Main Street right there in your hometown, near the appliance store and next door to the one selling something called sporting goods. Perhaps it wasn’t an actual shop at all, but the back shelf in your local stationary store. Maybe it was a Woolworth’s “Five and Dime” or the Rexall Drugstore down on the corner – the one with the soda fountain up front. Better yet, how about a real honest-to-gosh toy store and bike shop with a large model section in the back? No matter what the locale, the mere sight of boxes like the ones pictured above was probably enough to get your pulse racing if you were building models as a kid back then.

A ritual to keep those cherished memories alive occurs here in Southern California several times a year, one that has been perpetuated continuously since 1975. Known as the Kit Collectors Exposition and Sale, this gathering of the clan takes place like clockwork on the first Sunday of the chosen month, and a special group of friends whom we now call “the family” drives from near and far to share the mutual love of collecting vintage models and all that this special hobby represents. I mention this because an interesting happenstance occurred a few years ago at one of the official debrief lunches following the show. Sitting around the table were guys who’d all built kits back in the day and who were happily reminiscing about their experiences, playing their own version of David Letterman’s famed “Top Ten list”.

Our version went something like this: Name the top ten favorite models you ever built; Name your top ten favorite model boxtops; Name the top ten favorite kits you always wanted but could never afford, and finally; Describe your favorite hobby shop. Although exploring all the above-mentioned categories was immense fun, it was this last topic that drew the most in-depth and personal recollections from everyone seated at that table. Floor plans of those favorite hobby shops were actually drawn on the backs of napkins and the vivid detail utilized in those descriptions was simply astonishing. It soon became apparent that the memories of those magical stores ran exceedingly deep in this crowd.

We shared indelible memories of which shelves housed which brand of kits, or which oversize kits were held vertically on pegboard with “S” hooks, safely out of reach of grubby little 12-year-old hands. There were colorful recollections of how the store windows looked with all those fabulous factory build-ups of the latest kits carefully displayed right at eye level. I’ll bet those factory-supplied dioramas did more for the successful marketing of plastic models than all other advertising combined. We shared stories of riding our bikes to the hobby shop and leaning them up against the front of the store or a nearby tree with nary a concern that they wouldn’t be there when we returned, and if there was ever a good example of the phrase “gathering of the clan” in the ‘50s and ‘60s, this was it. So let’s take a moment to examine a typical hobby shop window, circa 1959.

There were always the inevitable custom car model contest winners – a highly-coveted honor for any of the local model car nuts. And who could forget those amazing cardboard backdrops shown with the latest guided missile kits such as the Renwal “Blueprint Series” Nike Ajax, or Monogram Snark or Regulus II sitting atop their bright yellow launchers? What about airplanes, you ask? Sure, they were all there from the new supersonic Century Series jets to the latest new commercial jet airliners. With World War II and the Korean War still fresh in our minds, you could also count on a bevy of prop-driven warbirds to be displayed in that window, but they were usually the ones hanging from the ceiling suspended with monofilament fishing line.

Ship models were also well represented, such as the latest aircraft carriers from Revell or Aurora mounted on their turquoise-painted plywood bases and covered with clear acetate. There might even be an example of the mammoth S.S. United States kit from ITC all lit up at night with its innovative interior lights. Best of all were those Revell and Renwal cutaway models of the new George Washington-class nuclear submarines, each carrying 16 Polaris missiles. The incredible detail displayed inside those ships was like something from another realm – especially if you came from the era where building the Lindberg USS Wasp was the most complicated thing you’d ever tackled.

Once inside the store, another unforgettable memory was the amazing aroma that greeted visitors, a prominent smell of enamel paint, styrene cement and airplane dope wafting through the air usually laced with second-hand cigarette smoke emanating from the owner himself. If perchance there was sawdust on the floor, so much the better, but the smell of cardboard was also a large part of the mix. (Come on, fess up – who hasn’t opened a well-preserved vintage model box and taken a whiff of that precious 1950’s air held inside all those years?) Add to this sensory mix the seasonal aromas of a fresh spring day, autumn leaves, or winter’s blustery cold all mixed together with fresh auto exhaust drifting in from the street, and you had the makings of some very strong olfactory memories.

Not to be overlooked were the names of those hobby shops, most of which were highly reflective of the ‘futuramic’ times during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. There was ‘Hobby Craft’, ‘Hobby World’, and of course my very own local establishment, ‘Hobby-Rama’. Sometimes the owner’s name would be employed in the moniker, such as ‘Sid’s Hobby World’, or ‘Mel’s Model Emporium’, but generally, all the stores tried to outdo one another with very cool names that conveyed the very best of those enticing boxes waiting for us inside. Regardless of the name, we couldn’t wait to get down there every Saturday – if for no other reason than to just to hang out with our friends.

I can’t help but wonder how many of these original establishments are left in the world, especially in this day and age where ‘just hanging out with friends’ now involves a modem. Despite the cold antiseptic aspects of our digital world, all is not lost. On any given Saturday, we can plug in, log on, and try to hunt down those same exact models we bought at Hobby-Rama or Sid’s Hobby World. Only now those 98-cent kits are priced at hundreds of dollars, and we’re looking for them on eBay.