I'm a Big Children Now

I said in the description of the HHR 'toon that I didn't know whether my next major purchase would be a set of Hawaiian flower floor mats for the HHR, or a slot car set. It turned out to be neither one (nor none of them neat-o chrome bare foot accelerator and brake pedals that I want to customize "Hula Dancer" with, neither).

HAWK Models was founded by by Dick and Phil Mates in 1928, producing wooden models, and are said to have produced America's first plastic model, sometime in the late Forties. Thus, still in business today, they bill themselves as "America's Oldest Model Company". I gotta take that with a grain of salt, since they've become--since the Seventies--part of Atalieri, and then Testor's, or the other way around, and are now a subsidiary of a division of Multi-National Mega-Corp Global World-Wide & Screw Anybody Who Doesn't Like It, Un-Ltd. Still, it's good to see the old brand name on the shelves. It helps keep alive my faith that somewhere there IS a heaven and a St. Peter who looks a lot like a farm club Fred MacMurray and when he says "C'mon in, sonny" and lets you through that Pearly Gate (Gate singular, the plate glass one, with the sign hanging on a piece of string and say's "Yes, We're Open!" on one side and "Sorry, We're Closed" on the other), there will be endless shelves of HAWK and Monogram and Revell and Renwal kits, and yea verily I say unto you even the lowly Aurora and Lindbergh and Pyro shall be gathered and among the blessed, and they will all still be made by small companies owned by people who are either model builders themselves or at least care what their model builder customers think. And, lo, thou shalt have endless allowance and Coke bottle deposit money to buy them with, and when thou openeth the box, choirs of angels will sing as you inhale the sweet frankincense of pasteboard and virgin styrene. New car smell? Hah! Strip off that cellophane wrapper and take a deep whiff as you lift the lid off a new model box--now THAT'S a SMELL!

And, yes, I got a whiff when I did exactly that with "Beach Bunny Catchin' Rays". I could have had her for 98 cents back in '64 or '65, but, as somebody back then warned, "the times they are a'changin'", and they sure as hell did, 'cause with postage and handling, she cost me right at $25 today. But worth every penny!

For some reason, which I cannot now recall, I did not have this kit as a kid. I was aware of it, but didn't have it. I built cars, airplanes and ships, but I built figure kits, too--almost all of the Aurora "Famous Monsters", a "Rat Fink", and some of HAWK's other "Weird-Ohs" type kits. But not Beach Bunny. She may have been a bit too "lurid" for the five-and-dimes in my little Baptist burg to handle (even as late as 1966, when I started buying PLAYBOY as a fifteen-year-old, the clerk at the Mr. M convenience store had to reach under the counter to get 'em--I guess God couldn't see 'em hidden under there). And, when I did get to a real hobby shop in Dallas or San Antonio, I guess I was just more intent on buying something else the local variety stores didn't stock, like one of the big Renwal or Adams military vehicle kits (or more of the Mongram military figures kits--God probably had more trouble keeping track of the number of those I bought than he did seeing those PLAYBOYS under the counter at Mr. M). But, I've got her now. And now, of course, like with all my model kits, I gotta find the time and energy to get her built. They've changed the formula on the glue, so it's harder to get your aura focused than it used to be.

Which brings us to:

ARTISTIC LICENSE DEPARTMENT (with apologies to MAD Magazine): I surfed (ha, ha) all over the web and never could find a pic of a Testor's glue tube from that era. So, I just did what Rembrandt or Renoir or Ingres or Elvgren or any of the other Masters would have done. I faked it. The one in the pic is my "artist's interpretation" of what the tube looked like, based on photos I found of a vintage tube of Testor's glue for wooden models, and one of their 25-cent bottles of liquid plastic cement from that halcyon age. And the warnings on the latter (which I distinctly recall being on the tubes as well--and I mean on all of them, not just Testor's), along with the idea that it might have been morally irresponsible for the people at Ragsdale's, Mott's or Duke & Ayre's to have sold an innocent young tyke such as myself such an obscene model kit, led to the title of this particular effort.

Republican friends and family frequently launch into Limbaughesque tirades about about the "nanny state" and "frivolous lawsuits" costing corporations $$$ to put warning labels on everything, and blaming Ralph Nader and the consumer activists as the cause, as if it all started with them in the Seventies. As this shows, however, those warnings were always there. I think what happened in the Seventies was that we all got our "consciousness raised"--whether we wanted 'em raised or not (or, for that matter, whether SOME folks had one to raise or not), and everybody either (a) realized if it had a "flammable" or "explosive" or "do not take internally--seek medical help immediately" warning(s) on it then maybe it really IS dangerous, or (b) got mad at group (a) for forcing them to have to think about it enough to have an opinion on the subject (or, worse yet, take responsibility for it if they were producing it or selling it).

Of course, the case may have been overstated on the model glue. I've been using it since I was four or five years old and ain't keeled over dead yet, and never even burned down the family home in Texas, much less started a conflagration so vast FDNY would have to respond. I DO have a burn scar on the inside of my right knee, and while it was the result of an adventure in modeling, it had nothing to do with a tube of glue bursting into flames. But that's a story for another cartoon (and, no it didn't involve anything so mundane as heating and stretching sprue over a candle to make an antenna for a tank).