Reading some old issues in the archive, and noticed something..

[hon30critter]

Hi Randy

Interesting observation.

I believe that there was much more of a tendancy of 'feeling superior' in those days. Lots of people tended to support their fragile egos by openly criticizing others who they felt were inferior to them. My own family exhibited that same tendancy. My mother often implied that all the other families on their block had inferior parenting skills. In her opinion her parents (my grand parents obviously) were so much better at organizing family activities. She fairly bragged about the fact that she thought that the neighbourhood kids had a much better time at her house than she did at theirs. The old adage that someone was 'from the wrong side of the tracks' was strongly supported by both thoughts and words.

Fortunately, my parents also raised us with enough intelligence to see past those attitudes, which I think is the case with most of us on the forum.

Dave

[rrinker]

it seems there was a whole lot of animosity towards younger modelers in the early days. In more than one early issue, a letter writer more or less actually stated that younger modelers just can't do as nice a work as an adult. Plenty of arguments against having junior members in clubs in those days, too. All this negativity had younger modelers on the defensive, witness the Jan 1950 letter from a 14 year old, commenting on John Allen's article on making figures from a wire core and layering on wax. He starts off "Since I am only 14, this might not be a good idea, but here it is anyway". His idea? Leave the end of the wire longer to use as a handle to hold the figure while coating it with wax and painting it, then snipping off the excess after it is completed. This suggestion is now commonly seen with nearly any article involving making objexts that need to be painted or glued, yet held somehow, like trees and, still, figures. Either the handle is used to hold the object without touching the finished surfaces, or it is used to stick the object in something like a piece of extruded foam to use as a stand while working on it. Not a very good idea? Even John Allen himself didn't think of this extremely useful tip, or if he did, he did not include it in his article.

 Sometimes I think the only reason the hobby survived the first generation is that a lot fo them were younger than the average age of today. There were plenty of modelers contributing material who were in their 20's and 30's in those days. The amount of scorn heaped on younger modelers though - talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. Thankfully things have changed in most palces and younger modelers are encouraged to take up the hobby, even if the takeup rate isn't as high as we would like. I'd like to say this mostly got going with the formation of TAMR, around 1964 or so? Sad that today is it reduced to a Facebook group with no activity, and their web site has been taken over by some sort of spammy diet site.

 I know of some camp like activities where kid learn about real and model trains, and even build a kit, and at many of our shows we allow kids to take the throttle and run a train around the layout. No, this is not another one of those "omg, the hobby is dying" threads, more of an observation of how we've gone from scorn for the younger modeler to actively encouraging them.

                         --Randy