In Part 1, I told you how I discovered the hobby shop and all of the riches contained within. By the time I graduated from college, I had been roped in to the hobby, lock, stock, and #11 blade (Who am I kidding--I was deeply hooked long before then). Between the hobby shops in Daytona Beach and Ft. Lauderdale as well as some mail order places, I was able to feed my habit. By the way, do you remember mail order? Quaint notion--you filled out a form, wrote a check, put it all in an envelope, stuck a stamp on it (Remember those? The stamps you had to lick, not those self adhesive ones we have now) and put it in the mail. In about two weeks, a friendly employee of the USPS had a package for you. The aftermarket was just starting to get a good foothold back in the '80's, and the only way to get it was to either have a well-stocked local shop or through the mail. Newer kits from Japan were also making their debut--I recall when a new Japanese upstart company called TriMaster first released their 1/48 scale FW-190D-9 kit--it sold for a whopping $42. Compare that to the $10-$15 that the Hasegawa, Fujimi, and Tamiya kits were going for, and that's a fair chunk of change. I finally bought it, using up two or three weeks' worth of disposable income...
Anyhow, I was hooked, bad. Every week I'd make the trip to the hobby shop to get the plastic fix. New kits were hitting the shelves fast and furious--and of course, they were subjects I had longed for and in my preferred scale. That all adds up to the fact that I "needed" them. Lest you think I'm jesting, it was (and still is, to an extent) an addiction. Substitute plastic models for dope and hobby shop for dealer, and you're close to the mark. Well, I would hang out at the hobby shop for hours on end and shoot the bull with the local club guys every Sunday. We'd all usually arrive at 11:00 or Noon, and hang around for the afternoon. This went on for quite a while...
Warrick Hobbies had by this time moved from their store in the Twin Oaks Center on Davie Blvd. (I still miss the train layout in the enclosure in front of the store) to a similarly sized store at the corner of Griffin Road and University Drive. By the time I became a regular, talk was that the owner was looking to move again, this time to a store in the old Best Plaza at University Drive and Peters Road. Talk became reality, and the store moved sometime in 1991. Well, moving the store closer to home didn't help matters much. I would spend Sundays at the store, talking shop and seeing all the new stuff available, as well as seeing what everyone was building when they brought their models in to show.
I guess it was around 1992 or 1993 when the then-manager was going to get married and take some time off. He asked me if I thought I could fill in for him for the weekend. It didn't take me long to answer, and that started what was to become a working relationship that would last until 2001, when I moved to South Carolina. From my first visit to the store out on Davie Blvd., I remembered that the stock was a good, solid foundation of kits with some good aftermarket products beginning to appear. As the years passed, we would add product lines as the customers would want the new stuff, both kits and aftermarket. New companies would come along with newer products--decals, once the territory of Microscale, were being produced by a half-dozen firms now. The new decals were sharper, better researched, and included basic histories and color instructions. New lines of brass were available--a little Czech company called Eduard were popping out new sets weekly, it seemed, and they were giving Airwaves a run for their money.
As we would add lines, we would gain customers. Actually, we didn't see them as customers--we had friends that we sold hobby stuff to. The local club would hold their unofficial meeting-away-from-the-meeting at the store, on Sundays (I guess the few of us that started hanging out on Sundays started a trend). We'd go have dinner together at the local pizza joint (3 Guys from Italy, University Drive and I-595 next to the IHOP--don't bother, it closed and became a taco bar) or the then-new Applebee's that opened across the parking lot from the store. As an aside, if you work in the food service industry, here's a tip--if you take care of your customers (as the staff at the Applebee's did throughout the years), the customers will take care of you. I think we collectively put a few of the wait staff AND their kids through college....
By about 1996, things were really humming like a well-oiled machine. Sure, one or two of the guys would move away--one moved away, then came back, then moved away again right about the time we moved to SC. Then, the manager moved. A few years later, the Third Musketeer in the department also moved. A few of our good, core customers also moved about a year after that. There was a great disturbance in the Force, but the shop didn't seem to notice--business was still good. The period from around 1985 until maybe 2002 was a Golden Age in Plastic modeling--a subject that I'll cover that sometime later--as the product was selling itself. In 1999, I met the woman who I was destined to marry, and by 2001 I had decided to move away. Consider that some of the folks who were instrumental in the shop were also wheels with the local club, and both institutions were feeling the loss...
In the meantime, down the road in Miami, Orange Blossom Hobbies had enjoyed the same period of success that we had at Warrick. They would be packed on the Saturdays that I decided to ride down and check things out. It seems that the guys who stopped in at Warrick on Sundays also congregated at OB on Saturdays, too...
To me, it all seemed to fall apart after the September 11th attacks--now, I'm not trying to say that the attacks affected the hobby industry that profoundly, but things took on a new focus in the country. Consider this--I resigned my position at Warrick in late 2000 and moved away in September 2001. By the end of the year, Orange Blossom was closed, bankrupt. They liquidated their merchandise--some of it wound up at the Pearl Art and Craft on Oakland Park Blvd., as my wife and I found out while on a visit that December. Warrick had moved again, and while things seemed to be doing well with the new staff in "my" department, it never seemed to be the same. By 2005, the department was being "downsized". The last time I was there in December 2007, the plastics "department" consisted of a few kits. All of the aftermarket, all of those interesting decals sheets, all of the books, gone, blown out.
To this day, it still makes me shudder to think of what became of the vast stocks of decals--some long out of print--that both Orange Blossom and Warrick used to have tucked in their file cabinets. I also am saddened to think of all those aftermarket sets we bought for the benefit of the locals that got sold off for pennies on the dollar. I guess the lesson is this, kids--Support your local hobby shop if you are lucky enough to have one. If you don't, you'll find yourself in the position that a few friends of mine are in--everything they buy for the hobby (and I mean everything--glue, paint, putty, etc.) must be mail ordered. Of course, mail order these days is easy enough--a few clicks of the mouse, and *poof*, the order is on the way. But suppose you're trying to finish a project and run out of paint? Good luck finding FS35622 in the stocks at Office Depot. With gasoline creeping back up to around $3 a galon around these parts, that 80-mile drive migt not be on the slate this week...
I hope you enjoy my ramblings--thanks for taking the time to walk down memory lane with me. I'll have Part 3 ready in the near future.
Be good to one another, and I bid you Peace.
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