Their
interest in the automobile (and mine!) started
at a very young age, well before one could acquire an operator’s license. For example, as a 5 year old in 1953, I was
fascinated by a colorful Golden Book of Automobiles that featured stamps of
cars. My task (and that for thousands of other little boys) was to match the
stamps with blank spaces contained on pages that described specific cars. Undoubtedly,
along with comic books, it was one of the first books that I read. I routinely played with metal cast cars, made
in mass quantities by companies like National Products of Chicago where plaster
replicas were cast into molds and then painted in infrared ovens. It was not
long thereafter that I built the first plastic model of an automobile,
coincidentally also first marketed in large quantities in 1953.
Until the early 1950s, the hobby of scale modeling had a very
small following, not surprising, given the high degree of skill and patience
and the ability to work with wood or metal.
Beginning in the mid1940s, however, the technique of injection molding
had been developed. Soon thereafter, the Revell Company, founded in Venice,
California in 1943, used the designs of Gowland & Gowland from Santa Barbara,
California in a series called “Highway Pioneers.” Previously Gowland & Gowland had
partnered with Revell in making toy cars called “Action Miniatures,” strange
little models that bucked when one pressed in a protruding front cable. But
sales of the “Action Miniatures” indicated that there was a large potential
market for plastic cars, and thus “Highway Pioneers came to be. These sixteen
early plastic models were made in large quantities, and shortly thereafter
Revell began making its own models, followed by Monogram and Aurora. Model building became the number one pastime
of young boys by the early 1960s, and to further empty young boys’ pockets, by
the1962 Aurora began marketing their extremely popular slot cars and track. With
organized club events and the support of the Ford motor Company, Aurora,
Strombecker and the A.C. Gilbert Company marketed a variety of cars and tracks
to more than a million competitive “drivers” in 1962. It was a short jump for
boys to go from toy cars to their own cars, with the family car as only a
temporary set of wheels from which to learn to drive. And in time full scale cars would become toys
for bigger boys.
Been there, done that! Moving out of our house and downsizing, I recently dumped two large boxes of car models from my youth! They had been in those boxes for 40 plus years!
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