Model summer

Maybe the happiest summer I ever passed – the happiest time of my youthful life – was when I was 13 or so. Some model company had put out smaller-sized (1:72 scale) models of a raft of WWI aircraft, including tons of relatively obscure ones, like the Vickers F.B.5 and the Airco DH.2. I got a bunch of them, built them, and painted them. Even rigged them with thread to reproduce the control lines.

An old favorite: Flight Commander Raymond Collishaw's Sopwith Triplane, "Black Maria."

I wasn’t real good at it. I was careful, and managed not to smear too many windscreens with glue – always the bane of my model-building life. My painting of them met indifferent success, especially when I tried to do the multi-color “lozenge” camouflage used on later German planes. But I did my best, and had a wonderful time, and loved them all.

Sadly they didn’t survive the years and the moves. No real surprise. Really, it would’ve required a preservation effort far beyond my means and even inclination to keep them intact.

… I originally wrote most of this post as a response to the comment thread on In which I make myself feel old. You might want to hit the link and go check it out to get up to speed. It’s not that hard; in a World War I airplane you were lucky if you could get up to 100 miles per hour in the early years.

In passing, I note that getting old seems to be a popular topic, judging by the number of comments it’s educed. On the other hand, at this point I actually am well and truly qualified to pass the judgement that it does indeed beat the alternative.

So anyway … at various points over the years I thought of getting back into model building. But my attempts proved abortive, and anyway you (or at least I) could never again find models of most of the planes. You could, and maybe still can, find models of the most famous ones – such as the Fokker Triplane and the Sopwith Camel. But not many others.

The Guess Who were my favorite band as a kid. I didn’t really appreciate Led Zeppelin until college; I still like both bands quite a lot. The Conan novels (with the beyond awesome covers by the now-late but ever-great Frank Frazetta) I started devouring about the time I got to high school.

The other night, having read Harvey’s comment earlier, I was driving home late at night and reminiscing about my WWI Airplane Summer. I got sad – feeling I’d failed somehow. An altogether too familiar sensation for me. Then I realized: it was okay to feel nostalgia, and a sense of lost, for my colorful plastic treasures and the innocent child I was. But I didn’t fail. I had fun. That was the goal, truly, and that’s what I should most recall.

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