…after typing only the year numbers in this section, I went to the top of the list, and realized how many years I’ve been active. The first year below, 1959, could be considered the beginning of my “creative activity”. With loving thanks to my late parents, Al and Benita W., and my maternal grandmother, Helen Z.
These three people were humble, honest, working-class folks who I admired to no end. Though they weren’t radical thinkers or leaders in any field, they were hardworking people of Polish immigrant stock, who endlessly encouraged and supported me, and pushed me just enough. I felt confident in my talents and never felt forced into any specific career path.
Through my early years, I linked my star to a number of role models, all except a handful of whom turned out to be disappointments. We learn through our mistakes, they say, but if we undergo a learning process, how can we term them “mistakes”?
1959—MODEL CARS!
Actually, my involvement with model cars began in the Winter of 1953, when I spent three weeks in the hospital at age 5, for pneumonia and anaemia. Its was my only hospital stay until my recent bout with COVID-19 (more later). I unfortunately was in hospital on Christmas that year, and the one gift that I received that I can remember was an Ideal Toy Company (ITC) “Crystal Starfire”, a large-scale model—probably 1/12—of the Oldsmobile halo car, the Starfire convertible, with a clear plastic body. You can imagine what an inexperienced 5-year-old did with a tube of model glue and a clear plastic car model…I can’t remember this model existing after I went home from my stay. Incidentally, this model and its more common brother model, the Crystal Corvette—a ‘53 Corvette model—are model car Holy Grails, worth substantial sums today! This model was re-released with a coloured opaque body in 1961, and then vanished from the marketplace.
(ABOVE) The original Crystal Starfire package. This was the only image I could find of this model—a badly-damaged box. It had working lights , steerable wheels, and a battery-powered motor. A close examination of the graphics will clue you in to exactly how complicated this model was to assemble. For a 5-year-old?
(ABOVE) The 1961 reissue of the 1954 Oldsmobile Starfire kit by “ITC Model Craft” (Hobby Division of the Ideal Toy Company). Some clown got out his pinstriping tool. Notice the “ITC60” license plate. You’ve gotta be really OLD to remember the RAYCO drive-in car service places that were in every major city! They were GONE by the mid-‘60s, I think.
Then, in mid-1957, my Grandma Helen (Mom’s Mom, and my champion until her passing in 1983, took me with her to Chicago’s infamous Maxwell Street market—now much sanitised, I understand, though I haven’t seen it since ‘68—to do a bit of sight seeing and “shopping”.)
Maxwell Street was the place where you could purchase any manner of goods, from car parts to shoes to musical instruments, as long as you were willing to bargain and you didn’t ask where that 8-track player that caught your eye had come from, or had been “borrowed” from. Still, there were legitimate items also available at good prices, providing you were comfortable dealing with open air vendors and kept your wallet in a front pocket. This outdoor venue in a sketchy neighborhood was featured in the Blues Brothers movie, where Aretha Franklin played the owner of a greasy spoon who sung and gyrated to “You Better Think”.
The smell of Polish sausage drifted through the air from oil drum grills set up on the sidewalk. My 8-year-old stomach began to growl immediately after we stepped down from the electric Halsted Street bus. Gram warned me to stay close as she fingered $2 cotton house dresses hanging on a rack, and later inspected a copper-bottomed frying pan to replace the one she had at home that was ready to burn through. She paid $2.50 and took it home in a previously-used brown paper bag that smelled like beer.
After about an hour of stumbling through the crowded aisles, my feet began to grow tired and she took me to a street food stand where we each devoured on of those “Polishes” with grilled onions and yellow mustard, and sipped on bottled Cokes through waxed paper straws, she asked me if I wanted anything? I told her…well, there was this model car kit that I’d seen a few stalls back…and she asked me to show it to her.
That day I went home with my first 1/24 car model kit—a Revell Lincoln Futura, molded in Pale Aqua and clear styrene, with vacuum-metallized (“chrome”) parts. I fondly recall clutching it tightly on the bus going home. I couldn’t wait to build it. Of course, I was by now eight, but nearly completely inexperienced (remember that Crystal Starfire, three years previous!), and the results were slightly better, but about what you’d expect.
ABOVE—Revell’s Lincoln Futura kit from 1957, later butchered into the original TV Batmobile by George Barris, who never met a dollar bill that he didn’t like. A sad end for a beautiful, historiic Golden Era concept car. The original car has been replicated fairly authentically, with the only issue being a terrible catalogue instrument cluster. I ask—why spend well into six figures constructing a gorgeous replica of a landmark automobile, and spoil it with a catalog-bought $300 instrument cluster? Never let a hot rod shop build a dream car without close supervision—like many builders, though their level of craft can be exquisite, they often operate formulaically when it comes to hardware.
(ABOVE) American Skyline. Seventy years later, I still think that this is the best building set ever released in the 1950s.
Other gifts that had an impression on me were at least ten plastic model kits of cars and one sole boat. Though the 1/25 scale model car hobby was starting to hit its stride after its genesis in 1958, I had not yet been bitten, and the models I received from my well-intentioned folks were by odd companies in non-standard scales. I recall a 1/20 scale Jaguar XK120 coupe and a Strombecker “road racing” set with two fairly accurate 1/25 cars—a Scarab and a Jaguar. These were battery-powered, with the batteries being carried in the cars themselves, with an on-off switch being a lever underneath the front pan.
Instead of track, this set had flexible 3/16” LDPE tubing and connectors that were intended to be scotch-taped to a smooth, rigid surface with cellophane tape. The cars had two pins protruding from the bottom which followed the tubing around a layout. Odd, and never repeated. But I couldn’t get enough of the Scarab model itself, which was molded in metallic blue-gray, and had correct gold scallop decals. (This model gave me an intense dislike of driver figures. Where were their legs? I wondered.) This Scarab tooling was used for many years, released annually by Strombecker and much prized today by collectors.
(ABOVE) The Strombecker Scarab car model, in 1/24 scale. Available in either the single car kit (like this) or as half of a “road racing” set, with a Jaguar XK 120 as the other car.
(ABOVE) The parts to the Strombecker Scarab 1/24 scale model car. This model was amazingly accurate for its era!
I also received a 1/32 scale Wheeler Sport Cruiser boat model, which got me hooked forever on the stately beauty of wood-hulled cabin cruisers. When I first moved to SF in 2003, I seriously considered buying a 42-foot Chris-Craft Constellation as a live-aboard, since rents were so ridiculous. But, then, with twin V8s inboard, so was gas and maintenance.
The other gifts that I received that Christmas, with the exception of a Skil-Craft microscope set, are present in my subconscious only. Skil-Craft, which was located in Chicago’s Near North neighbourhood, was later to become a client. I wrote, illustrated, and pasted-up dozens of instruction manuals for them in the early 1970s, pre-Photoshop.
WATER TOYS !?!
Mom and Dad continued my STEM (as they’re called today) gifts at Christmas. The Renwal Toy Company, famous for their “Visible” line of model kits, also made a model—believe it!—of the PANAMA CANAL. It was greatly stylised and sold for the primary purpose of demonstrating how canal locks actually worked—and the four locks on this model came with four scale ships and a booklet explaining the principles and details. It wasn’t meant to be filled with water, which to me took away a lot of the charm. The ships had wheels, and they were raised by a lever-jack system to move them up and down to the next level. DUMB TOY, even for a 12-year-old boy. I also recall a REMCO Mr. Kelly’s Car Wash, which DID use water. It had a clear plastic top over the battery-powered wash conveyor, and a squirting mechanism. It was what toy designers called a “watch me” toy, with the only play pattern being filling the water reservoir, hooking the toy car to the conveyor, then watching it being pulled through and wetted, and hand-waxing the clean toy car. Career training?
Speaking of which, my 15 year career as a staff, and freelance, Toy Designer, 1972-1987, taught me many things of course, and number 10 or 11 on the list “to avoid at all costs” was water toys, except in the case of outdoor activities. Still, I pushed ahead and designed at least five. This car wash toy WAS messy indoors in Chicago in winter, and by the time warm weather rolled around, it was already Old Hat, having given up its place in my preferences for model car kits. ‘Bye, Mr. Kelly.
(ABOVE) The Renwal PANAMA CANAL toy. I suppose the recessed yellow centre section (“Gatun Lake” in the product brochure jargon) could be filled with water. Messy and dumb, in retrospect.
NEXT—TO 1960 AND 1961—MODEL CARS AND ART