Flashback 2000: Building model ships is a lost art

     The boys will be home, tonight, if the travel gods smile upon them. First time in, well, quite a while. Plus two daughters-in-law and a grandbaby. Quite the full house. Which I take as a compliment —nobody forces them back. They arrive of their own free will. I think having had a pleasant childhood helped, evidence to the contrary, such as this 25-year-old column, notwithstanding. 

     I am building a model ship. This will come as a shock to my friends, who know me as one of those relentless grinds who work and work and work and, as a break, gets together with co-workers to talk about work.
     I don't know where the ship came from. A Lindberg 1/64-scale model of a U.S. Navy Torpedo Patrol Boat, still in its shrink wrap. With the commotion of packing for our move, it must have been dislodged from whatever shelf or box where it has hidden for years. The copyright on the model box is 1976.

     My oldest son noticed the thrilling painting on the box of the PT boat bursting through a wave as its machine gunner trades bursts with a Japanese fighter.
     "What's this?" he said. I told him. "Can we build it?" he asked.
     As a young man I was terrible at models. I haven't the patience. The glue got everywhere. I didn't read the instructions right.
     But the prime directive I try to follow when struggling through dadhood is this: Don't say no unless you have to. As unappealing as the idea of assembling this craft was, as hectic as things are, as certain as I am that the boys will destroy the model the instant it is complete, if not before, the fact is, we could do it. I said yes.
     We spread out newspaper on the dining room table. I opened the wrap on the box. I lifted the lid. I looked inside.
     Ayiiieeee! A million tiny pieces. I considered slamming the top back down, leaping up with a "Whoops boys, no boat inside" and rushing it to the trash. But I saw the expectant look on their faces. I grimly began sifting through tree after tree of plastic parts.
     Instruction one began: "Place motor 55 onto mount 56 then flatten pins with pliers as shown in sketch. Next cement and press pulley halves 12 onto motor shaft and propeller shafts 46 as shown in photo. . ."
     A few years ago, I was at the New York Toy Fair and, filled with nostalgic memories of model planes and boats, I slid over to the Revell-Monogram showroom, where I learned that models such as this one, boxes of parts that have to be meticulously glued together over hours and hours, have gone the way of the realistic toy gun. Kids no longer have the time for them. Revell-Monogram's new line of "Snap-Tite" models could be put together in about 60 seconds, without glue or paint.
     Model-building, as a child's pastime, is a fading art.
     "We get a few kids," said Gus Kaufman, co-owner of the Ship's Chandler, a Mount Prospect store devoted to model ships. "But mostly it's the older generation."
     He said when he started, in the 1970s, models were popular among the young. Then they discovered computers.
     "When it comes to using their hands now it seems they're all thumbs," he said. "Nobody wants to take the time to build something. That takes too much effort. They've got to think."
     Do they ever. Some of these instructions are as cryptic as Mayan hieroglyphics.
     Progress is maddeningly slow. Every blower, every cleat has to be glued onto the deck. The cleats are 1/4-inch long. I try to involve the boys — it's their job to pry the pieces off their trees, to dab the glue on, to hold the piece so it sets, to scramble to the floor to find the tiny hatch cover that daddy drops.
     We've been building it for a week now, and I've spent long, agonizing minutes, squinting at some oddly phrased directive, the boys gazing at me with sagging admiration.
     But they keep gazing. And I do not give up the ship. Each day, it slowly progresses. Which is the entire point of these things. A 1/64 scale model of a PT boat will not help either them or me, in and of itself. The memory of having built one, however, the dogged determination and patience needed to not do a botch job, is priceless.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 11, 2000