I’ve just packaged up and will send out a model airplane kit, one of two I bought several years ago having seen an advertisement for kits at reasonable prices. I actually built the first kit and thereby hangs a cautionary tale.

On our last tour across the country with our trailer, I brought along one of the model airplane kits.  My thought was that I would build it with my California grandson who was really too young to do much with it. Generously, I thought that I could show him HOW to build a kit and thus generate a desire to one-day build a model airplane himself when he became older and more adept.  Actually, I hungered to produce a working model airplane all by myself with an adoring audience watching me, because of going down into the basement of John and Judy Mountjoy’s house in Winston Salem where John builds and stores his ENGINE powered planes that he flies in competition with other model plane enthusiasts.

 My efforts in the past when I built model planes only included rubber band powered craft.  And, one actually flew as designed from a third floor window over an empty lot next to our apartment house on High Street in Newark just that empty lot away from the storied YMHA on the corner of Quitman.  It crashed, of course. I built that one on my mother’s marble-topped coffee table and cut it up quite badly with the razor blades needed to shape the balsa wood parts. I learned not to do that.

I remember watching one of the men from hot busy New York City who came up on weekends to HOLIDAY BUNGALOW COLONY in Hopewell Junction, NY where I was the Head Counselor of the day camp.  He spent the winter building model airplanes and once, a model boat, all powered by motors – enjoying himself by watching them destruct plunging into trees or the lake. Model plane builders are mostly of that variety.  John, however, would go out with his disassembled planes to a farmer’s field out in the country with other buffs.  They would assemble and fly their planes directing their soaring, diving and acrobatics from little levers jutting from little black boxes.  It can be quite exhilarating even for watchers. John, a retired surgeon, also builds fine furniture.

Nevertheless, I spent about a week constructing this model plane (with, for) Jon Schectman.  This was in his room at his desk that I had taken over.  Soon, realizing that he was not included in the actual construction, Jon left me to worry over alone and make my own mistakes in putting the parts together.

In spite of perverting the experience for Jon, I actually finished building a plane that couldn’t get off the ground and that was compensated for ill joined parts by inventive additions that did not work.  For a while there, Jon left the plane in a corner of the room just like the frieze I drew up near the ceiling of planes, satellites, rockets and space ships above his closet wall was ignored. It remains as a monument of my trying to act out on my artistic leanings.

Building model airplanes is no longer the thing for boys to do.  The new twist on kits coming with pieces of balsa wood, paper and glue is the model already built and ready to fly. They are all made of molded plastic. I couldn’t see the fun in that.  So, I brought along a model airplane kit and discovered that it was now work and work of a kind that did not bring satisfaction.  I really wanted to inspire Jon to want to do it by himself.  I probably killed that desire in him forever.

But, there is an end to this story.  I have just packed up the second kit that I bought a long time ago and will send it with this essay to the entire Schectman family out in Portola Valley, California.  Here is what I envision:

My thought is that this can be a family enterprise without the old Grandpa intruding.  I see the entire family excited by having parts of the kit building as their job. I see Hal, Denise, Jon and Emma  collaborating, cooperating and enthusiastically waiting until the end when they troop out to the valley behind their house and watch that model airplane fly effortlessly to the limit of its tightly wound rubber band.

But, whom am I kidding? Me, of course.