I have never been very good at keeping up at regular blogging; but occasionally I feel the call to put up an update. My last post was 2 years ago…I was just settling into our new life in Northwest Florida when we got put on hold like the rest of the world thanks to the pandemic. Unfortunately we were hit pretty hard by coronavirus when we lost my father to it in December of 2020. He came down with a nagging cough, and struggled with it for about 2 months; before succumbing to the illness. He spent most of December 2020 in the hospital sedated and on a ventilator before passing away two days after Christmas. It was horrible to be so far away from Southern California and unable to travel and be there for my mother. My father had lots of sayings, and loved to quote movies, and one of his favorites was from the.classic Clint Eastwood movie “The Outlaw Josey Wales”…it was used by Dad as his bemused “keep on keeping on” response to the obstacles in life; the great line from the film as quoted by Dad was “We shall endeavor to persevere”. Loosing Dad was difficult, forcing us to try our best to live that advice. I suppose life is approaching normalcy, but when things get tough I just put my head down, push forward and endeavor to persevere.
Dad was a life long model builder; he grew up in the fifties and made tons of plastic kits; cars, boats, planes & tanks. He never stopped making models and once told me his favorite toys as a kid were the planes and tanks he made from scratch. I asked my Mother what it was like when they first got married and she moved into his apartment and she told me he had models on the window sills, on tables, and in the kitchen cabinets! I lived in two houses growing up and both of them had “hobby rooms” with floor to ceiling shelves filled with all sorts of model kits.
Dad influenced me and I started making models around 10 years old or so. Dad always took us to hobby shops, back when every town had several. It was a regular weekly ritual to hit the comic shops and hobby stores through the greater San Bernardino area growing up. This was decades before nerd culture went mainstream; and there we were he from the 60’s and me joining along in the 80’s. I was around 10 years old when he started making plans for his large scale remote control ships.
Dad was a welder and and an assembler by trade. He liked making things as a hobby, at one point he started building a street legal race car, he saved up parts and got as far as a tubular steel frame with axels, and a steering column.
After a tour of duty in the artillery in the Army he started working in a steel mill. When the steel mill closed he retrained as a welder and then spent the rest of his working career mostly building truck trailers; during down turns he would get laid off. The layoffs forced him to find other work building mobile homes/RVs, modular containers, and even office furniture partitions, but the trailers paid the best so he eventually would return. The trailer plant also had his favorite work shift…4-10’s with every Friday off. He’d leave for work at 2PM, and usually get home by 2AM, Monday through Thursday. It made for an interesting dynamic growing up as when I got up to go to school Dad was home and sleeping, but when I got home from school and when I went to bed at night he was still gone. The upside was every weekend was a 3 day weekend. Fridays we would hit hobby stores and movies a lot.
We also tended to hit the hobby stores on Sunday as well, Sunday was “The Boats”. We lived in Rialto but not too far away at Fairnont Park in Riverside the Inland Nautical Society (a model boat club) would meet every Sunday at Lake Evans to run remote control boats.
This became a ritual of my Father and my Uncle for decades. Dad started laying out his schematics for his boats in the 80’s but wouldn’t really ramp up production for almost 20 years.
Saturday mornings I would go with him to the local library and we would research our respective interests. He would read books and magazines on remote control boats, and military hardware. He would make xeroxes of the schematics for the ships he wanted to build; his first designs were for the Civil War ironclad U.S.S. Monitor, an Oliver Hazard Perry Class Frigate, and a Ticonderoga class cruiser.
Dad could freehand the shapes he would cut out of plywood using only his Xeroxes for reference. While he started the hulls in the 80’s it probably wasn’t until the early 2000’s that everything came together and his fleet became reality.
Dad was a great worker and was always turning down being foreman or supervisor, he just wanted to do assembly work. He had a great work ethic but he didn’t love working and took his retirement as early as he could. So when he retired he really went full steam ahead with his fleet. I have lost count as to the size of it; maybe 10 or so; and these are big ships…including an aircraft carrier that was over 7 feet long. Dad’s ships are remarkable for several reasons, like I said they are huge, 4-7 feet long, they are scratch built by eye, and they are made from plywood and found objects. He was always on the lookout for raw material…pill bottles, perfume caps, bits of wire, toilet paper rolls, salvaged styrofoam. It was really amazing what he would repurpose for his fleet.
They are fascinating folk art objects, and they looked fantastic out in the lake where they were surprisingly convincing. Pop didn’t agonize over 100% accuracy or perfect craft; but the ingenuity of the scratch build, with repurposed salvaged material and at remarkable scale really set his models apart.
I remember him excitedly telling me how he used a large television box and the foam packing inserts for one of his ships, with some cleverness and grey paint he had an aircraft carrier. Lately I have taken inspiration from Dad and keep an eye out for materials I can repurpose for my own modeling hobby. I collect as much packing foam as I can and cut and carve it into buildings and landscapes.
