Model Show At Airport Hangar

What was the first scale model you built?

I don't recall.

At 57, I grew up with Revell models of the 1960s. Cars, ships and airplanes, mostly.

My mind took the journey back in time as I talked to Charlie Kucera, president of the Alexander Lippisch Chapter of the International Plastic Modelers Society that is holding its seventh annual show Saturday (May 1). For the first time will be at the PS Air hangar at The Eastern Iowa Airport south of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (See today's Ramblin' in The Gazette.)

Charlie, 53, couldn't remember his first model, either. But he's built literally hundreds of them. He posed with one of his latest creations, a Japanese submarine, dubbed an I-boat, that is 56 1/2-inches long. Hanging above it at Box Kar Hobbies in Cedar Rapids is a silver B-17 he built.

Seeing that W0rld War II bomber is what triggered my memory. I don't know how many hours I spent at my basement hobby table building my version of that very bomber. I carefully trimmed parts from the plastic trees they came on, sanding off any remaining nubs. I painted the parts before I put them together -- black tires, silver guns, camouflage fuselage top and sky gray belly. I used toothpicks to apply just the right amount of glue. Man I was proud of that model. But, except for collecting dust for years, I have no idea what ever happened to it.

I know I built all sorts of other stuff -- an aircraft carrier, destroyer, submarine, TBF Avenger (an uncle flew one during World War II), a Chrysler turbine car, a Studebaker Lark, a 1957 Corvette . . .

My favorite all-time build was a 1968  Pontiac GTO. I spray painted the body in a lime green (wild colors were "in" that year) and jacked up the rear end.

I would have been 15 when that car with a whole new body style came out, driving on a learner's permit and thinking about owning my first car.

No way was that going to be a  muscle car like this. But a kid can dream.

That was the fun of building model cars. A fantasy come true at a fraction of the price of the real thing.