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Monday, April 05, 2010

BUILDING MODELS AND MEMORIES

All you boy fugitives from the 30's, 40's and 50's who were into building model airplanes long before those mind-numbing video games and Ipods will be interested in this weeks column that appears in my column in this morning's Trenton "THE TIMES" newspaper.
Click on the link at the top of the page and journey back to your boyhood as I recall Testor's and LePages airplane glue, stringers, formers, struts etc.

3 comments:

Mack said...

Hi Tom:)
Marsh Hobby Shop used to have
cheap balsa wood planes from a
basic model that was like a buck to
more elaborate models.
with a rubber band you could get
it to fly for a bit..they would
often break in one day for me but
were cheap enough to just buy again
:)

Candy Frenking Jens said...

Hey, Tom, you didn't really mean to be sexist, did you? I (and other females, I'll bet) enjoyed model-making. The ones with a balsa skeleton and tissue-paper skins were the most difficult - but the most satisfying when they shrunk to perfection. Our next-door neighbor had a couple of plane engines in the cellar; he never tired of trying to start them by spinning the props. What a racket when he succeeded! Hardly ever did he installl one in a plane, however . . .

Tom Glover said...

Hi Candy:

Funny you should mention the feminine side. My next door neighbor at the time was a lady named Betty Sneath. She saw my attempt at a Curtis P-40 and went out and bought a Jap Zero. It made my wrinkled P40 look like it crashed.She did a beautiful job and the darn thing flew beautifully. A true work of art. Women are much more adept at that sort of thing with the painstaking job of covering a model with tissue. Betty was the best.

As usual, great to hear from you and to know you are still visiting my blog.
XO
Tom