Something personal

 I have been hinting at it, and threatening to write this since day one. I just had knee replacement surgery six days ago, so I am propped up on the sofa with pillows and blankies like “Abu-Ben-Pablito  Sultan of Whimsy”, so I have time…

I became interested in Model railroading in 1964 when I was four years old. Unlike most of these stories my first scale was HO. My friend Lee Walser, from down the block, had an HO layout sprinkled with a lot of plastic kits and a great deal of wooden kits his father built when he was young. 

Hook-horn couplers were the cutting edge technology of that day, and frankly we recoiled in terror from cars with Kadee couplers back then.

My father transitioned me to n-scale shortly thereafter although I did have one layout from the 101 HO layouts you can build. The idea of N-Scale was, I suppose, to get more layout in my available space.

As time marched on I had some of the usual distractions from model railroading. I did get into model kit building, building and collecting a great deal of military kits. 

We, the neighborhood kids, collectively decided that this hobby would be organized along several distinct lines. 

All models would be of WWII era, no exceptions.

All aircraft would be in 1/72 scale. 

All vehicles could be 1/32 (or 1/35, I don’t remember which scale Tamyia producing kits in) or 1/48 scale. 

Ship models were valid in any scale, but again only WWII era.

The whole point was, if they did not follow these guidelines, THEY DID NOT COUNT. And counting up our respective armies mattered, for some reason. 

Finally, and the ages of our group covered about a six year spread, we all approached High School, and the real killer of all hobbies, dating. 

 Team sports were not very popular in my group of local friends, but I discovered Football, and this caused me to drift away. As I recall I still kept up my interest in board games, it helped that one of my teammates, an All-City Linebacker,  Kelly Wood, loved Avalon Hill board games too.

I devoted a greater percentage of my time to lifting weights, and working out; in short getting ready to play Football. Around the football team I kept my hobby quiet. I went off to college, majoring in Left Tackle and minoring in History. 

My hobby was still viewed negatively by many of my “peers” but something Tony Koester wrote way back then to the effect, “Model railroading is the most important thing I do with my life, and I shouldn’t be embarrassed to tell people”. Being one of the biggest, strongest kids in any school I attended meant I had almost no negative peer pressure; in short no one bullied me to stop model railroading. Good.

From the time I left college, dropping out of the PHD program (19th century British History and “Sports and the British Empire), until I was married model railroading sort of simmered below the surface. I’ve been married to Helena for 34 years, we met in High School. In all that time she did not fully grasp the extent of the sickness. The benchwork for AIR1 came as a life altering shock to her.

After a couple years of marriage I entered the “Family Business”, Hollywood. In 1930 my Grandmother ran away from home to get into the pictures. Both my Grandmother and Mother were studio musicians, life members of the Musicians union. My Great uncle George was a studio wrangler, westerns being almost the only thing produced in Hollywood at the time. My Father-in Law, after a lifetime in “real” construction took a job in the studios as a carpenter (Propmaker), to take it “Easy”. In 1990 the stars aligned and I got hired as a propmaker on the movie “Rocketeer”.

After two months at Disney on Rocketeer, Universal Studios had one of its semi-annual back lot fires and I moved over to Uni to work on the rebuild; the 1990-1991 rebuild this time. With-in two weeks of my arrival the word went out that Uni needed carpenters, and they would hire ANYONE. 

My brother, John, had been working in “Outside” construction for about 15 years, “Hey, you want a job at the studios?” The rest is history.

So over the next 32 years, with the exception of Universal’s fire, I worked at Disney based productions and John latched on at Warner Bros.

Standard studio construction, the way in which EVERYTHING  in the entertainment business is built, is a version of what we, in model railroading call, Open Grid. In the movies we build boxes; stack them one way and they’re an aircraft carrier, stack them another way and they’re a police station. I spent the next 32 years honing a skill, layout construction: AKA Standard Studio Construction. 

A niche, specialized, very popular, hard to get,  on the job training for a hobby. 

Kill your TV!