Rediscovering The Wonder and Torment of Plastic Models

 

   This time will be different.  I’m a grownup and I know how to follow directions.

   With that in mind, I have decided to tackle one of my childhood demons – the 1:25 scale plastic car model.  After all, how hard can it be to finish building a level 2 plastic car model?  The answer depends on how you would define the word finish.

   I built a fleet of car models in my life.  It was a boredom buster for my friends and I in the days before video games. We would ride bikes to the 5 and 10 (cent) store and pick out a cool model along with a few jars of Testors paint and a new tube of glue. With the hopefulness of a Cowboys fan in August, we’d race home, stack a few Beatles lps on the turntable and crack open the box of wonder. 

   Whether we were building a Model A Roadster or a hot rod Cadillac Hearse (seriously), the modeling process for 11-year-olds was the same.  Ignore the directions and start painting stuff.  The results were predictable but satisfactory for an 11-year-old who had lost interest about halfway through the project.

   Five and dime stores no longer exist. Neither do $3 plastic car models. Model prices now range from $25 - $40. Surprisingly, many of the actual models have not changed at all.  Model kit companies like AMT, Monogram and MPC have been bought and sold since the 1960’s but the actual molds and packaging have survived. The model I chose to rebuild my confidence; a 1960 Ford Starliner, was probably designed and molded sixty years ago.

   I say that I never finished a model because every time I assembled one, I was left with a pile of spare parts. There was a usually a water pump and a rocker arm, a few shock absorbers and a radiator hose left over.  That stuff was hidden anyway, right?

   The most dangerous but most satisfying part of the project was painting the car body.  Years of bad paint jobs have finally convinced me to follow paint instructions this time.  I watched a YouTube video and followed the advice of “professional modelers.”  Did you know you are supposed to wait for one coat to dry before applying the second coat?  

   Glue was the biggest hurdle for me. No matter how careful I was, there was always a smudge of glue somewhere on the “glass” windshield.  I recently watched an enlightening YouTube video on that as well. This time it will be different!

   Models weren’t much fun once they were completed but I never had the heart to throw them in the garbage. Years later when we were married, I wisely recognized that my childhood car models would not be part of the new home decorations.  I stacked them in a big pile and photographed them before sending them to the junkyard for good.  They all had one thing in common – a chubby fingerprint on the front or back windshield and a lousy paint job.

   This time I will build a model with all of the parts and no chubby fingerprints – probably. I will keep you posted.

   Send comments about your car model experiences to flipsidecolumn@gmail.com.

 

I withheld comment recently when someone on Facebook posted photos of the “ice storm” that shut down schools and highways in Dallas last month. Others were not so kind.

In fairness, it was a thin but solid sheet of ice that covered everything. The photo didn’t really tell that story and several readers mocked the phrase ice storm.  It really was more of an ice dusting but one person’s storm is another person’s dusting I suppose.

There is a sense of pride or smugness when it comes to telling tales about surviving terrible winter weather.  Bragging about the weather is an unsanctioned sport in coffee shops and office lounges “up north.”.  Most tales start with “It was so cold that….”  They often end with someone else saying “that’s nothing. I remember when…”  Eventually the group nods in approval that the final tale depicts the coldest, longest, or snowiest storm ever.

The title of worst winter storm, according to numerous sources, belongs to the Great Blizzard of 1888.  The storm hit the northeastern states in March 1888. It caused more than $20 million in property damage (about $550 million today) and killed more than 400.  New York City was buried under 22” of snow. Further north, cities were hit with up to 50” of snow in two days.  Wind gusts up to 80 mph buried buildings, horses and people under massive snow drifts.  Now that’s a storm to remember or forget.

There’s a bonding that occurs when several people experience the same storm, even though it may have happened fifty years ago. The really bad storms are etched in people’s memory in much the same way hurricanes and tornadoes mark history for hundreds of years.

Everyone has a good winter storm story. Texans may have felt left out of that conversation until February 2021 when the temperature dropped way down and millions lost power.  Winter storm Uri, as it was named, has the dubious distinction of being the costliest winter storm on record with $196.5 billion in damages.  My memory was more localized as I fought the ice flow in my pool for a week with a large wooden pole.

My personal winter storm brag is surviving the Chicago blizzard of 1982.  A week of snow was followed by extreme low temperatures of -26 degrees on January 10 and high winds that pushed the wind chill to -80 below.  The weatherman didn’t mince words when he said “if you go outside you and your pets might die.” It was good advice.  It was so cold… that ice formed on the inside of some walls of our home.  I should mention that it was a rental.

A temperature of -26 sounds darn cold but residents of Fargo, North Dakota will brag that their grandparents survived -48 degrees in the late 1800’s.  Then again, workers on the Alaskan pipeline recorded a balmy -80 degrees in 1971. Let’s just hope the storm tales are over for this season and we can get onto bragging about the heat.  Did you now that it was so hot in Texas last summer that…

Send comments and your own storm brags to flipsidecolumn@gmail.com.