Dad was flying Air Force helicopters in Southeast Asia, must have been 1972. My sisters and I were home with Mom in Colorado Springs. I was 7 years old.
Somewhere around that time I discovered monster model kits, specifically the square-box glow releases from Aurora, on the toy shelves at JCPenney, which used to be a fun store for both kids and adults instead of being fun for no one. Those monster models enchanted me.
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I also missed Daddy and wanted to talk with him. So, with Mom’s help, I wrote my first letter to my father, wishing him well and asking him to teach me how to build models (not spelled “modles,” Mom told me; she also had to straighten me out on “deer”) when he got home.
The years of my early life exist as sort of a block of time in my mind, a variety of events that occurred for me simultaneously. I remember myself as an undefined little boy who watched too much TV, had plenty of toys, and drew picture after picture in pencil on the Big Chief tablets with which Mom endlessly kept me supplied. Heck, I probably wrote that first letter on a piece of paper torn from one of those tablets.
Dad came home, we moved to his next posting in Austin, Texas, and he taught me the basics of building a model kit. The first one I tried was some kind of car with a picture of a green-faced monster on the box, and I don’t think I ever finished it. Ten years later I was absorbed in my fascination with real cars, but I have never once done a decent job with a model car.
But then I put together a Wolf Man, and oh boy. That was terrific. I loved all the Aurora monsters and built six or seven of the glow versions of Aurora’s original 13 monsters. Prehistoric Scenes came on the market not long afterward and I loved them just as much. The childhood Christmas that I remember most fondly is 1974, shortly after I turned 10. Santa — by then I knew he was Mom and Dad — delivered the Aurora Tyrannosaurus Rex, and that year I genuinely could not have asked for anything I desired more.
Ah, Dad. I was lucky I had you in my life more than 54 years. We had our conflicts and that’s just the way things go with fathers and sons. But you and I played catch hundreds of times, you got me home safely from youthful idiocy more frequently than I care to remember, you worked to pay for everything, for all of us, and you taught me how to build model kits. You treated my wife and my kids like royalty.
My father is Joe Powell, born in 1932, died in 2019.
I’m still on the path Dad helped set me on, all those years ago. Building models was part of my childhood and became part of my adulthood in my 30s. Nowadays I have my own business, Escape Hatch Hobbies, and produce models. This June, I hope to travel to Louisville, Ky., to sell my kits at WonderFest.
awesome heart felt tribute