The
Classic Scale Models
These are the scale models that the people in my family
think of first when the topic of my father’s boat building is brought
up. He enjoyed building them and
sailing them. He also liked to show
them off. He entered his boats in a
contest sponsored by a local model airplane club. His work left the judges somewhat
gap-jawed and he won several trophies in the years that he participated. A few times a year we would pack up the
car and drive to Central Park in New York City. Why go to such effort, drive forty
minutes away, fight city traffic just to sail a boat when there were plenty of
ponds nearby? There’s a lack of
social contact with this aspect of model building. That may be why he took such
a long time off. In the summer of
1971, he thought briefly about getting back into flying and drove to the local
model airplane club to inquire about joining. They pretty much snubbed him and he
thought it was because he was known to them as a boat guy. Airplanes were off the menu for the
remainder of the decade. He became
interested in model racing yachts after reading a few magazine articles. In 1972 he built his first racing boat
and didn’t build another scale model until 1979. When he did go back to building scale
models, he applied the skills he learned during the racing years to build boats
in less time. The ones he built
after the long break looked nice but they lacked the extensive detail of his
earlier work.
These are most of the scale boats he built during my
lifetime.
