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
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.
Randy I think your observations are very much on point and indeed I think there are strong vestiges of them around even today. But having lived through at least part of that era, and having known many hobby veterans going right back to Charter Members of the NMRA, there are some aspects to this that need to be explained, not as a justification but purely as explanation.
My cousin Ken Ducat was not a charter member of the NMRA (but he did start subscribing to MR in 1934, albeit not to issue #1, and one of his track plans appeared in the July 1936 issue) but as a boy he was there at the famous meeting at the Milwaukee YMCA – he was leaving after going swimming, saw a man enter a door holding an O scale locomotive under his arm, and followed that man to a meeting that was one of the NMRA organizational meetings. When he came in the room, one of the men there yelled “this is an ADULT hobby!” and ordered him to leave, but someone else said “let him stay” so he did.
Back in the 1930s and well into the 1960s, indeed to a certain extent continuing today, this importance of making it clear (to yourself if to nobody else) that this is an adult hobby, “No I am not playing with toys and I am not acting like a child by enjoying model trains,” and the slight sense of shame that keeps some guys from letting their classmates, work associates, neighbors, relatives, etc., know they are model railroaders, was very strong. One way to reinforce that sense was to exclude youth.
Second, the 1950s in particular saw a huge change in methods and materials and in quality of finished results and the old veterans who would hack a boxcar or flatcar out of plain steel or tincan material felt rather threatened by the new world of plastics – being able to say “I built this” was deemed to forgive any number of really marginal models. I remember one letter to MR by a guy who seemingly with a straight f
Model trains have always been seen as an adult hobby as a previous poster mentioned. That attitude still effects this community today, especially with more expensive prototypical models. A lot of modelers seem to think kids are incapable of handling expensive models and not breaking them. I’ve seen more adults drop and break models than kids.
I think another thing holding this community back is that we keep saying this hobby is art. It seems to feed peoples self centered egos. They think all kids can do is roll out a grass mat and snap snaptrack together and maybe place pre built trees wherever. Nevermind the fact that there are videos on youtube of 8 year old kids handlaying track and making their own turnouts.
Adults tend to always look down on the younger generations because they figure their experience outweighs kid’s creativity. I find both experience and creativity go hand in hand and promoting and sharing both tend to grow our hobby. Where would we be if people didn’t share their experiences or had vision to make something great or think outside of the box?
The worst problem in this hobby though, is people who can’t just agree to disagree. I keep what I do in the hobby to myself not because I’m afraid of criticism or opinions, but because I don’t feel like arguing and defending myself everday of the week. I’m trying to be more social with this hobby by joining discussions and forums, but time and time again I see so much back and forth arguing on many sites. We all know everyone likes different things, but some people can’t seem to accept that. A good example is dcc vs anything else on the market. Or x company vs y company. Brass vs plastic. So on and so forth. Anything new or challenging to the old ways seems to be frowned upon as well.
We have a lot of work to do in all our model train communities.
Dave,That hasn’t change much over the years–we still see that on some forums under the guise of unwanted “constructive criticism”…
Anyway…Being a kid in the hobby back then wasn’t easy although the Columbus HO Club and the Columbus O Scale Club allowed junior members at the age of 16. To be sure we junior members in the HO club formed our own little group and discussed what we would like to see in the future-some older members called us “dreamers” while others agreed with our thoughts.
All to sadly the young modelers today still face discrimination at most clubs-I know of one club you have to be 18 to join and visitors under 18 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian…
Don’t lose sight of the fact that in 1950 twenty somethings had just returned from WW2. I dare say they were men and teens were boys in their opinion and somewhat justified.
Was there age discrimination way back when? Not yet born at the time of Randy’s referenced letter to the Editor (I would be in just another three short months, however) I do recall the 1950s. However, being a kid, I was pretty much oblivious to these types of problems. I fooled around with my HO trains and never attempted to get into a club and didn’t care that they even existed. That there was discrimination of all sorts back then, is a given, considering that the decade before there was an attempt to eradicate the entire planet of specific races and religions, kids being held as second class citizens seems “Blaise” in comparison!
We have moved on and we are somewhat better. Is there room for improvement, yet? You bet your sweet bippy there is!
I also read the article the 14 year old was refering to by John Allen and John did suggest leaving a handle to hold with a point for sticking into somthing while the figure dried. The kid might have overlooked John’s suggestion. Making the handle bigger with a loop also made sense.
I really think there were more. One guy whose last name was Carr had an angry letter in just about every other issue - many of them beginning “Hey Westcott!” (the editor at the time was Linn Westcott). If he wasn’t angry at MR he was angry at the NMRA. And when Westcott retired he recalled in an interview in MR that when he became editor he went through all the mail and was shocked by how many negative letters there were and what a large percent of the total the negative letters represented. I think he decided to print more of them than had been printed in the past.
By the way back in the 1960s if you wrote a letter to MR and asked a question, you might not get the letter printed but you often, almost always, got a response, either a postcard with an answer or your own letter with the answer scribbled in the margin. I am ashamed to say I kept none of mine even though they came from Westcott himself and from Bill Rau.
Another name that appeared regularly in letters almost always chastizing MR for something or other came from a fellow with the last name Bogart.
Difference today is just fewer letters total, I think. Within a day of an new issue apeparing, there are posts here with likes and dislikes, so the old “letter to the editor” I think is going a bot the way of the dodo. Even the ones that are printed - be curious to know how many are emails vs someone actually writing something- I suspect nearly all of them these days.
I just remembered this and got a chuckle…Remember the letters about Student Fare,Working On the Railroad,Bull Sesson and Paint Shop was a waste of magazine space? All to sadly MR caved in and done away with those columns. It seems the nay sayers usually get their way.
Fast forward to today and everybody complains about how thin MR has become.
I think Dave’s historical insights into how the model railroad hobby wanted to differentiate itself from “kids playing with trains” is a good one; an easy way to do that was simply to exclude kids. That mentality is still out there among the public as witnessed by some of the coverage of the recent Amtrak accident, where considerable focus was one the fact that the engineer enjoyed trains as a hobby since he was a kid. Seemingly, this was a significant factor, as he could have just been “playing with trains” and cuased the accident by being involved in such a “childish” hobby. We need not discuss this further, as attempts to do so elsewhere revealed what may certainly strengthen such ill-founded prejudices as another aspect of the hobby that definitely doesn’t make us look “adult” – the childish and petty bickering we often read going on between us.
Going back to Dave’s historical angle, there’s another aspect that could be involved. It used to be that you were pretty much either a child or an adult. At 13 or 14 (if you were lucky enough to wait that long) you got a job and were on the cusp, at least, of adulthood. Now if you get through all kinds of school, you may be 25 or older before you start a serious job hunt (never minding all the PT work in between). The in between status of being a teenager was something that only really sorted itself out after the Great Depression and the full implementation of child labor laws, etc. Then that more legally defined status became a target for marketers of clothes, music, etc, further defining this generational interlude.
So the founding years of the hobby and the NMRA were also years when rapid societal change was underway, including the status of young people. We’ve not always been good at dealing with change as a society, so we really can’t expect much better from our hobby. Not making excuses, just offering some additional explanation and context to things in the past, which may also g
This is interesting. I am somewhat a younger modeler. I am 29 years old and consider myself a newbie. However, today, older and more experienced modelers teach me how to be better at my hobby and I teach them how to use a computer. Sharing knowledge and experience in 2015 is way different than it was back in the previous century. Also: there are always grouches here and there. Antoine
Allow to mention something I always thought didn’t help the “Adult” side of the hobby.
A lot of Lionel ads of the 50’s featured a boy wearing a Lionel engineer hat … Several MR cover photos featured a smiling adult with a engineer’s hat during those years and yet,it was just like you said.
That brings up another aspect of things. Spend time enjoying yourself with a hobby? How juvenile! Or at least that’s often the social message we get in terms of doing anything other than work. Many “professionals” seem to spend an inordinate amount of time emphasizing how they’re “always on.” Many take to one-upping each other how many hours they spend at work. Americans take less time off work than most other modern societies (although that’s largely because the weak situation for labor sees us getting far less vacation and personal time than most in other such nations.)
Work, work , work.
Yet most would agree that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy…and a dull adult.
We’re very conflicted as a society on the human need for recreational time. And this feeds into social norms about what “adult” behvior is vs kid’s. Kids play, adults do “serious” stuff for recreation. Frankly, I have no trouble saying I “play with trains” and to then argue that every adult needs a similar outlet – or they risk a very dull and unfulfilling life. And that one should start young in cultivating such a healthy, yet socially controversial habit.
Oddly, despite all the emphasis on “productivity,” few critics of recreational enjoyment seem to have trouble with so many Americans doing nothing but parking themselves in front of the TV for daily multi-hour viewing sessions. To me, that’s a real waste, especially when one could enjoy an active and engaging hobby, rather than serving as the passive, fleshy containers for marketing every useless thing to they make us feel anxious to need.
MR still gets “angry” letters, mostly via email. Most of those letters address things beyond MR: prices, manufacturers, lack of kits, lack of younger hobbyists, lack of new and interesting things in the hobby, and stuff like that. We also get letters about too much or not enough DCC and too much or not enough N scale and other scales (except for HO).
Recently we received a few negative letters about the radio-control/battery story in May’s issue. One reader said “why run such a story, absolutely no one does that.” Well, the people in the story do it.
That’s nothing new either - check out the negative letters when they ran the original CTC-16 command control series. And all the while when the Bruce Chubb C/MRI series was running. Predictable complaints “this is way too technical” “nobody is doing this, it’s way too difficult (and expensive)” - Bruce was of course using his C/MRI to run his layout, AND he used CT-16 at the time.
