Nerdy nostalgia

OK, I've got to put up something light just to relieve my stress. Years ago, long before video games, before Dungeons & Dragons, what did stereotypical young male nerds do? One acceptable answer would be model railroading - there was a gigantic subculture of that - but I was poor and living in a family with six kids, so there was no space for the layouts. The other answer would be building model kits.

You might not know it from my current suave air, but there was a time between 12 and 18 years of age when I was building and painting all kinds of models: model planes, model rockets, model movie monsters, all that stuff. I also branched into balsa wood models in high school. I had these things hanging from my bedroom ceiling, on my dresser, on the floor. Because of the aforementioned lack of space, I did a lot of the crafting in my grandparents' attic, which had the dual benefit of a large amount of storage room, and that my grandmother would come up every once in a while with cookies and milk.

So it was nice to stumble across this video summary of the various model companies that dominated the 60s and 70s. I swear, I recognized half the models shown and remembered building them.

You might ask what happened to my vast cluttered collection after high school. I abandoned them. They were left piled up in my grandmother's attic, and then she died while I was living far, far away, and the house was sold and the old memorabilia had to be cleared away, and some of my relatives asked if they could blow them up with firecrackers and set them on fire. I said yes. Sometimes you just have to let go of childish things.

I do wish they'd at least made video recordings of the carnage. Those big old balsa models in particular would have been spectacular in their fiery demise.