Musical Wanderer

T his was a mighty and adaptable little toy.  Monogram models offered this model of a jeep and 37 mm gun together in 1957, during the early years of plastic model building.  By the 1960s one could buy plastic model kits of cars, planes, ships, and tanks in hobby stores, department stores, even drug stores.  The jeep was a famous vehicle of the Second World War and the gun was an early American weapon to combat tanks.  The two together perhaps gained mutual fame from this photo taken before the US entered the war. It’s a nifty photo from the period the US was rearming before Pearl Harbor.  Readers would find it exciting that the jeep was so speedy that they were airborne, but guns this light were found to be wanting in actual war and were replaced by bigger, heavier guns.  Even the helmets the soldiers wear, leftover from the First World War, were replaced in 1942 with helmets that covered more of the soldiers' heads. I got the model about a dozen years late...

For anyone who enjoys Christmas, a decorated tree is basic.  Some folk like white lights and little red and green plaid bows on the tree.  Though I am a WASP, I find such trees bland and sterile.  I like colored lights and an assortment of ornaments, some new, some dating back decades, some impulse buys at the hardware store, some passed down from family members.  Though physically a decoration, the Christmas Tree becomes a statement of a family, whether the people are related or not.  One rarely gets a tree by himself or herself.   Robin and I started dating right before Christmas of 2003.  By the time Christmas of 2004 approached, we were a couple, or as Mouse says in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City , "somebody to get a Christmas tree with."  So we got a tree.  We bought some ornaments, including a set of Harry Potter broom party favors.  We were in Sullivan's Toy Store on Wisconsin Avenue looking for presents for folks when ...

When I was a kid, Christmas was the big ask for toys.  The playset you saw advertised during Saturday morning cartoons all year.  The toy that NONE of the other kids had.  Below are two highlights of my childhood. As I became an adult, Christmas was the gathering of family, the frantic shopping a couple days before Christmas Eve, the onslaught of holiday movies, wonderful and awful (everyone has their own list of each:  I've only recently learned the folly of saying out loud what I thought the awful Christmas movies were: inevitably they will be at the top of someone's wonderful list), and the welcome vacation from school, both as a student and a teacher.  Sacred TV rituals of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and "Charlie Brown Christmas Special" sometimes gave a meaning to Christmas (I still lose it when Linus says "Lights, please?"). For years Christmas Eve was actually a reflective alone time for me.  When I was a music student in Ohio, everyone...

I wrote a couple weeks ago about naval ship models I built and included some photos of the ships. When I outed myself in having such a strange hobby, a couple old friends from college chimed in that they built similar models when they were kids, including a several who raved about models they built produced by a Japanese company called Tamiya.  Well I built some of them myself as well, both as a kid and as an adult, mostly about 10 years ago when I was working part-time while taking care of my folks.  Building models was a good distraction from watching them decline.  Here are some I built by Tamiya and other companies. A vehicle invented for the US Army during the Second World War was the Jeep, a vehicle which has endured in modified forms to this day.  It was used by all of the Allies of the US, including the United Kingdom.  During the campaign fought in the North African deserts of Libya and Egypt, a new British Army organization, the Special Air Service, us...

With all normal routines shot to hell of late by the virus this year, I, like many people, have found new or resuscitated old hobbies.  A dozen years ago, on a trip to Massachusetts for a wedding, we happened to drive past the WWII battleship USS Massachusetts  moored in Falls River, Massachusetts and ended up touring it.  On the way out of the museum shop, I bought a model of the ship on a whim, thinking I'd build it.  Buying and building it rekindled interest in a hobby I thought I put aside forty-something years ago.  I've built almost two dozen ships since, of varying difficulty and quality, the frequency of building depending on work and other commitments.  As much of my life outside of home has shut down during the pandemic, such as singing and volunteering, I've had time recently to build a couple more models. A model of anything is built to a specific scale, essentially the ratio between measurements on the model and measurements of the object bein...

It started when I was a kid.  Probably 1971 or 1972.  I was in the toy section of Lowen's in Bethesda.  For anyone growing up in southern Montgomery County in the 60s and 70s, Lowen's was Mecca for toys.  The place had every toy a kid would ever want. The store had a glass case with toy figures made of painted plastic with metal bases to keep them upright, a line by Britains toy soldiers called Deetail.  They were about 2 inches tall or 1/35 scale.  Cowboys and Indians.  Knights on horses.   Arabs and Foreign Legion.   Union and Confederate soldiers with cavalry and cannons.  World War II soldiers with vehicles.  What caught my eye at the time were the German soldiers and American soldiers from World War II. German WWII Soldiers American WWII Soldiers I loved the devastated trees that came with the package so a couple soldiers could have "cover." My friends liked cars and motorcycles, so they also caught ...