Rants and Chants

This past week I stopped into a store along Rt. 17N near Ramsey, NJ. The Hi-Way Hobby House is going out of business and holding a clearance sale on their remaining merchandise. It is yet another piece of Americana being lost.

Yes, it is a cliché, but when I walked in it was like stepping back in time. They had a wall of scale models and racks of paints and glues. When I was a kid, I loved assembling models both for the pride of doing a meticulous job in the assembly and for the funny way the glue fumes made my head feel. They had an entire aisle of HO and N gauge trains. In my youth, I probably had a hundred feet of track and scores of train engines and cars, as well as buildings, many of them passed down through several generations. I still have them in boxes in my basement. The store had Star Trek action figures exactly like the ones I had when I was a kid — and even the play set of the Starship Enterprise, which features a small booth that simulates a transporter by spinning. They also had model rockets — the kind with actual incendiary rocket engines that would launch the rocket high up into the sky, usually with it coming down well beyond the field where we launched them.

When I was a kid, every town in upstate New York (and probably in America) had at least one hobby shop. There were classical older ones on main streets, rich with the smell of balsa wood. There were middle-aged ones in roadside strip malls or bright, youthful ones in the newer indoor malls. During my lifetime, as our economy has shifted from urban and small-town living to suburban, I watched as the stores moved from Main Street to strip mall to indoor mall. However, eventually many started to go out of business. It was only just over a year ago that K-B Toys closed out. While it had started out as Kay-Bee Toy and Hobby, by the time it folded, it had shifted over to mostly toys. Other stores either became or lost out to mail-order catalogs. More recently, computers and the Internet have killed off the remaining hobby shops – in more ways than one.

Even before the Internet, video and computer games took a bite out of the hobby business. It wasn’t just that kids began spending more time playing electronic games than they did scale models. It was also that computer games like SimCity allowed them to build intricate, highly interactive virtual worlds for less money and in less space than a real train set would require. Why build and race RC cars when you can play Grand Theft Auto? Or RC planes when you can get the virtual flying experience of Microsoft Flight Simulator? Why buy an ant colony when you can buy SimAnt and avoid the risk of real ants escaping in your bedroom? In addition, sites like Club Penguin, SecondLife, and World of War Craft have replaced the old board or card-based role-playing games.

The best of the hobby shops were the size of small or medium sized department stores and featured not only aisles dedicated to specific product categories, but entire quadrants of the store’s floor space divided into sectors for art and craft hobbies, science hobbies, collector hobbies, and game hobbies.

For science-based hobbies, the ultimate hobby “shop” was Edmund Scientifics’ catalog and for the lucky few in the mid-Atlantic or Northeast states, a trip to the Edmund Scientific store in Barrington, NJ, was a pilgrimage that brought impressive bragging rights. I made that journey many times while visiting my paternal grandmother, who lived near there. I still remember the genuine submarine periscope in the entrance.

These are just a few of the things I, and our culture, will miss with the demise of the local hobby shop:

Magic kits and books of tricks

When I was very young, I fell in love with a short-lived television show called The Magician, starring Bill Bixby, and I loved reading biographies about Harry Houdini. The first career I ever remember saying I wanted to pursue was to be a magician. When my family got me a magic kit, I learned every trick it could do. The local hobby shop had even more gear and books for magic tricks.

Model Trains

Kids today don’t want the time-consuming assembly. Moreover, most of them lack the imagination to see how to keep going with the hobby once their set is completed — at which point all you can do is watch the train just going around repeatedly.

Chemistry Sets

My chemistry set had real glass test tubes., brass weights and a scale, a real glass thermometer, an alcohol burner, Litmus paper, pipettes, a beaker, rubber stoppers, and about 25 to 30 chemicals. Our local hobby shop stocked an additional array of chemicals in a variety of sizes. The rack more than rivaled the spice aisle at a grocery store. My one complaint was that I felt constrained by the book of experiments that came with the kit. If all I ever did was to follow the step-by-step directions, I was just learning by rote. I wanted to learn enough to be able to apply that knowledge to combinations that weren’t in the experiment booklet. With the advent of terrorism concerns and methamphetamine labs, many of those chemicals would now require a permit to purchase.

Telescopes

Today’s kids probably think of astronomy the same ways as I felt about the chemistry experiment book – like they are just following along behind the real astronomers. The odds of discovering a new asteroid or ever being able to see Jupiter better than Pioneer and Voyager have are low even with the best telescope. But I loved mine for the fact that, with your own eye, you could directly see some amazing sights. For some reason, no photo of the Pleiades has ever pleased me as much as seeing it through my telescope.

Photography

I remember on one of my first photography jobs was at a company that did line art for toy catalogs. They asked me to photograph, process, and print pictures of a collection of toys for them to trace for the artwork. The owner said he had a lab I could use — then he handed me an amateur photo developing kit that he bought at a hobby shop. The thermometer was no more than two inches long. The film tank could only hold one roll. The trays were just barely 5X6, and there were only enough chemicals for a first-time trial of about 24 photos. I loved the smell of D-76 — and even the feel of it. I worked barehanded so that I could tell by feel just how fresh the chemicals were and how far along the emulsion was in processing. The chemicals would penetrate my skin, leaving them smelling like a darkroom for days afterward.

Trading cards

I wasn’t one for sports cards; I know nothing about sports. Moreover, the way one used to get introduced to trading cards was through chewing gum. The cards used to come in a pack that included a card-sized plank of bubble gum. The first time I got trading cards, I was really just looking to get some chewing gum. I had cards for Star Wars and Close Encounters. I used to love the television and movie cards.

The best part about the hobby shop was that it catered to your interest and love of the hobby, so it spoke to something within you. You felt connected to the experience. The grocery store? Well, I have to eat, even if I don’t always want to. The clothing store? Unless your hobby is fashion, you are probably buying based on practical reasons. The hardware store? Well, damn it, half the stuff in my house needs fixing and it’s cheaper for me to do it myself, even though I am getting well beyond the point of really wanting to fix anything. But scale models, telescopes, chemistry sets, magic, photography, model trains, those were things for which I enjoyed spending time and money. Sadly, the way our economy and culture are going, I may have a hard time sharing those beloved interests with my sons.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 16th, 2010 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Chant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.