Model making

A very early memory of mine is a "ship in a bottle" that my dad had acquired somewhere. I was fascinated by it, and couldn't understand how the ship got into the bottle. My parents encouraged me to build model ships and planes and cars, those classic old Revell kits. I spent many hours assembling kits, but I was impatient of course.

A lot of my playtime as a child was model-making of various sorts. One of my favorite toys was simply a bunch of plain wooden blocks of different sizes. I would pile two smaller blocks atop a longer block, call it a "battleship", and drive it around the carpet of our living room, staging battles with other block-ships. I loved other construction toys, like Tonka trucks, which I would deploy in large earth-moving configurations in the sandbox. And of course Lincoln Logs, and Tinkertoys, and Legos.

One of my favorites was our family Erector Set, a ridiculously complicated box full of hundreds and hundreds of little metal pieces which we could put together and take apart any which way.

I don't really have a lot of memories of my dad playing with these various construction kits, but what I do remember is that he had a diecast model car on his desk, like one of these. It was some sort of convertible sportscar, perhaps a Porsche, and it had tires that turned and doors that opened and best of all the steering wheel was a real linkage and if you turned it the front wheels would turn.

I think I spent many an hour just annoying my dad while he was working on whatever, driving his little model sportscar all around his desk.