Time Flies

This post marks an aniversary of sorts. The first time I wrote one of these "Twisted From the Sprue" stories was in the summer of 2000. My IPMS chapter was trying to launch a monthly newsletter and I had a "column" under the" Twisted from the Sprue"  name. One of those first essays was about packing and relocating my modeling workbench as my family moved to a bigger house, a memory that came flooding back as my wife and I took the downsizing plunge this year and moved once again.

 Boxed up stash in the new man cave.

50 Years Beyond the Infinite - Kubrick's Space Odyssey

Back in September I saw the 4K (digital) re-release of 2001: A Space Odyssey on the Carnegie Science Center's big screen (yeah, if you' look at the dates that was about 4 months ago - now you know how long it can take me to write these). The digital version was released at roughly the same time as a new 70mm film print produced under the supervision of Christopher Nolan, and there is a lot of discussion as to whether the digital "print" was made from the new Nolan print or the original negative and how accurate the colors in the digital version are - it seems that the two are unrelated and the 4K version has received good reviews for image quality and for its accuracy in reproducing the original theater images. It certainly looked really good to my untrained eye. The 4K print is now available on Blu-ray disk for a very reasonable (about $20) street price.

Well worn 1968 paperback copy of 2001 - bought at a used book sale for $1.

Warning: this article contains spoilers about the movie and book 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you've managed to never see the movie or read the book or hear them discussed in the last 50 years, you're probably not going to, but don't complain to me if I ruin the surprise...

A Car Modelers Guide to IPMS

It seems like the guys (and a few gals) who spend their time gluing bits of plastic together to make model cars should have a lot in common with the guys and gals who glue bits of plastic together to make model planes and tanks. But walk around the automotive tables at an IPMS show and you’ll almost certainly hear someone whispering something like “these IPMS guys just don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to cars”. Usually they say it a little more colorfully than that. And you hear it again at the end of the show when the whispering is a little louder and along the lines of “how did that ever win!”.

May your hands always be busy...

In the unlikely event you've been reading these articles from the beginning, you know that this blog was supposed to be about the hobby of scale modeling - building miniature cars and planes and such. In the first few installments I actually tried to find some tie-in between the hobby and whatever I wrote about, but it kept getting harder to do. If you want to talk about scale modeling, you really have to do scale modeling, and I found myself drifting away from the hobby. I still get to club meetings and buy the occasional kit, but I'm spending less and less time at the workbench and actually finishing a model has become largely hypothetical. From the people I've met at IPMS club meetings and model shows, that is not an uncommon thing. Which made me a little curious about why.

A GT40 Detective Story

I thought I knew all there was to know about the GT40 - Ford's legendary race car from the 1960s. And then I saw a picture on Facebook of a GT40 at the Holman&Moody shop sometime between 1988 and 1990, taken by Russ Haines when he worked at H&M. Russ had asked if anyone knew anything about where this car was now. I thought this was going to be easy, but I would learn a lot more about the GT40 then I imagined before I figured it out. Not that I discovered something no one else had known, but this was a pretty obscure piece of GT40 history and putting it all together was kind of fun.

Many thanks to Russ Haines for letting me use his photos!

The Gulf Boys Go Racing (part 2)

In part 1 we ended with Grady Davis teaming up with John Wyer in late 1966, leading to the formation of JW Automotive Engineering (JWA) in England and the first official Gulf Racing team making its debut in 1967.  Lets pick up the story there...

The Gulf Boys Go Racing (part 1)

When Andrew Carnegie sold the Carnegie Steel company in 1901 to create US Steel, he became - at least by some measures - the richest private person then or since. But Carnegie had accomplished something even more impressive: Carnegie Steel had attracted and nurtured a technology base in the Pittsburgh region that would be unmatched until the rise of Silicon Valley nearly a century later. The Mellon and Pittsburgh National banks had grown rich financing the fledgling steel industry, and would continue to invest in Pittsburgh's entrepreneurs and engineers to develop the modern electrical power industry (Westinghouse), the aluminum industry (Alcoa), processed food (Heinz),  and heavy manufacturing (Blaw-Knox, American Bridge and others).

At the same time that Andrew Carnegie had been building Carnegie Steel, John D. Rockefeller was building the Standard Oil empire. While the automobile had not yet been invented, neither had the the electric light bulb or commercial electricity generation; petroleum products were in demand for lighting, heating and increasingly for commercial lubrication. In 1900 a number of Pittsburgh businessmen lead by William Mellon decided to get into the growing petroleum industry, and it wasn't their style to make a small investment in someone else's company; instead they got together and built a refinery near the newly discovered oil fields in Texas, followed by a number of pipelines, service stations, a fleet of oil tankers and other bits of infrastructure to support the rapidly growing automobile industry. A few years later, these investments were consolidated as the Gulf Oil company, which would soon grow to rival giant Standard Oil.

Born  in 1908, in a really small town in Texas not too far from Austin and the East Texas oil fields, Irion Grady Davis (you sometimes see him use his first initial, but mostly he just went by "Grady") had studied geology at Texas University, followed by a few years of polishing at Harvard. Fresh out of school, he went to work for Gulf Oil, spending 20 years in their Venezuelan operation. He apparently knew how to work with foreign governments to get things done, and in the mid 1950s was promoted to Administrative Vice President of Gulf Oil and transferred to Gulf's headquarters in Pittsburgh.  A few years later he was promoted to Executive Vice President - the number 2 spot in the company. He would play a big part negotiating with the Kuwaiti government for access to cheap middle eastern oil, which would allow Gulf to expand into Europe.

Grady Davis - early 1960s

Image shamelessly stolen from the Corvette Hall of Fame website, lots of good stuff there.

The Lost Art of Demolition Derby

Last August I stopped by my parent's house unexpected and found Dad wearing his good go-to-town blue jeans. Dad was getting ready to make his yearly pilgrimage to the county fair to see the Demolition Derby, something I hadn't done since my short-lived career as a derby driver back around 1980. Of course I tagged along, both to spend some time with Dad and relive old memories, not to mention the gastronomic wonders of a sausage and onion sandwich fresh off a food-stand griddle.

Reichholds Cafe - Basic Breakfast in the Great White North

Its been a while since I made a Breakfast in the 'Burgh post.  I just figured out how to turn on photo-backup on my phone, and shazam - I've got a bunch of pictures in my photo account that I forgot I had taken. This is Reichhold's Cafe, on Route 8 near the Allegheny-Butler county line - about 15 miles north of downtown Pittsburgh (map).

The Faceless Heroes of Shelby American (part 2)

If you read part 1 of this story, you've met many of the little known names that helped make Carroll Shelby a household name (at least in households full of gear-heads). But part 1 left off in 1965, with Shelby's greatest accomplishment yet to come, so sit back and read along while I try to wrap this all up.

The Faceless Heroes of Shelby American (part 1)

Out on the Internets Carroll Shelby has become a legend of Paul Bunyan proportions; he is credited with designing and building every Ford racing car of the 1960s and single-handedly putting Enzo Ferrari in his place.  Not only is Shelby's history as a racing driver largely forgotten, but so are a few people who did much of the real work of making the Shelby name larger-than-life. Trying to explain the history to someone on a social network is pointless, but maybe here someone will read and appreciate it...

The Death of Apollo: A Failure of Science Fiction?

One of the things that keeps me writing these little essays is that whenever I research something I find two or three other seemingly unrelated bits of trivia I never knew about, and since I'm willing to write about most anything, there is always a story to be told. In one of my recent missives I wrote about the demise of the 1960s muscle car, I mentioned that like the Vietnam War, spending on the 1960s US Space Program contributed to the inflation and economic turmoil of the 1970s. I still believe that is true, but proving it to myself sent me down a research rat hole to try to understand why the space program met with the same fate as the Pontiac GTO, so all that remains are a few artifacts in museum displays. Its an interesting tale, so pull up a chair...

Apollo 12 Command Module Yankee Clipper, on display at the Virginia Air & Space Center in Hampton, VA.

For a kid growing up in the 1960s the space program was hard to miss.  At school the Weekly Reader (a kind of newspaper for 8 year olds) was full of stories about the astronauts and the Apollo program. As the TV generation, we were treated to frequent "Breaking News from the Cape" reports in the middle of our after school cartoons, and then there were prime-time TV shows like Lost in Space and Star Trek.  And for birthdays and Christmas there were space related toys - space helmets and ray-guns and model kits and action figures and flying model rockets. Not surprisingly lots of kids wanted to be astronauts, except the geeky kids like me who wanted to be engineers and build the space ships (we also thought Scotty was way cooler than Captain Kirk).

The Last of the V8 Interceptors - part 5 of the Muscle Car History

In the last installment of this mini-series I covered the immediate aftermath of what was the Muscle Car Era through the rebirth of the muscle/pony car in 1982, and after banging away at the keyboard, I was thinking I was pretty much done. I thought this was going to be where I wrapped up loose ends and made a few snarky observations about the state of the performance automobile and today's muscle car culture.  But it looks like that will have to wait a bit longer.

The problem with being 55 years old is that I tend to think everything that I've been around to see happen is recent history. It seems like just yesterday that I traded my well worn '69 Road Runner for a brand new '83 Mustang GT, but a lot has happened since then, and since I'm trying to tell the whole story I just can't leave 30 years out...

Life After Death - part 4 of A Muscle Car History

When I started writing this mini-history about the American Muscle Car phenomena, I expected to knock out 10 paragraphs and call it a day.  When you're doing this blog-thing, 10 paragraphs is sort of the sweet spot for telling a good story, keeping the reader's attention, and not spending all your time writing about things instead of actually doing things to write about. But somehow this story got in my blood and I decided to do a multi-part series, and even after I covered the backstory, the rise and fall of what is generally considered the Muscle Car Era (1964-1970), there was still lots of stuff left over. Let me try to wrap it all up in 10 sweet paragraphs.

The Day the Music Died - part 3 of A Muscle Car History

Don McClean released the album American Pie in 1971, his anthem to the rock-n-roll of the just ended 1960s. The title song runs for over 8 minutes and takes up most of the first side of the vinyl LP, but it still managed to be a big hit. The lyrics are cryptic in the way of early Bob Dylan, but while exactly what it all means is up for debate (McClean once said "It means I don't ever have to work again if I don't want to!") the names and events mentioned clearly refer to the songs, singers and musicians of the decade. It starts with a verse about the day in 1959 that early rock-n-roll legends Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash - "the day the music died" - but its just as easy to imagine he was singing about the end of the hot-rod and muscle car era.

The evolution and popularity of fast cars largely paralleled that of rock-n-roll (and a lot of early rock-n-roll featured hot-rods and muscle-cars, including songs like Hot Rod Lincoln, Mustang Sally, Little GTO, Dead Man's Curve, and every song the Beach Boys put out before 1966). But by the late 1960s music had gone in a new direction - much like the rest of pop culture - thanks largely to the Beatles and the war in Vietnam.

More Muscle Car History - Part 2

How to describe the 1960s to someone who wasn't there?  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... The economy was booming, the US was going to the Moon, there were riots in the streets and 1000s of young men would die in Vietnam. The decade would start with incredible optimism and faith in the "American Way" and end with riots and a deep mistrust of government and industry that lingers to this day.

In the part 1 of this ramble down memory lane I told the story of the great American performance car from automotive pre-history up to 1964 and the first Mustangs and GTOs, and then I ran out of gas. While the muscle car era lasted less than a single decade, a lot of things happened in that time that would shape the future of both the automobile and American culture. With the background out of the way, lets set the Way-Back machine to the summer of 1962 and take another  look.

A (not so) Brief History of the Muscle Car - Part 1

When I got my drivers license in 1976, the only cars I (and most other working-class teenagers) could afford were well worn 1960s muscle cars. With plain-jane 1960s Mustangs and Chevelles and such selling for north of $20K today that probably seems a little unbelievable, but in 1976 we had just weathered the first OPEC engineered oil crisis. Leaving the politics and economics involved for another day, in the fall of 1973 the price of gasoline at the pump had gone up from less than $0.50 per gallon to more than $0.70 a gallon (remember minimum wage then was just $2.30/hour). Worse than the price hike, for several months there was a shortage of gas combined with panic buying that caused gas stations to literally run out - which at the time seemed akin to the sun not rising.

Suddenly all anyone cared about was fuel efficiency. Everyone wanted 6 cylinder Dodge Darts and Ford Mavericks; big-block muscle cars filled the classified ads at give-away prices.  Since high school kids don't drive all that much or have families to support, we were the only ones who could afford to drive 10mpg cars (just not very far). I bought my '69 Road Runner, with 70K miles on the clock and one dented quarter panel - for a whopping $500! As a result my high school parking lot looked like a scene out of American Graffiti.

As I now approach curmudgeon-dom (hold on a second while I chase some kids off the lawn :) - I'm often amazed at the confused and generally rose-colored view that today's car buffs have of those halcyon days. Like most (all?) 1960s American cars, muscle cars had the aerodynamics of a brick, the handling of a well worn pickup truck, and they rusted faster than a 16 year old kid could sling Bondo. The only things they did really well was go like stink and attract attention like Miley Cyrus at an awards show - and being part of that sure was fun!

Sneaking Through the Sound Barrier

Humans - men in particular - have a fascination with speed that is so universal that it must be genetic (probably the same gene that makes dogs stick their heads out of car windows). Coming of age in the 1970s, it was a rite of passage among my gearhead high school crowd to take our cars to a lonely stretch of highway and try to peg the speedometer. This was foolish beyond the chance of losing your license; the cars we were driving had crumby bias ply tires, stone-age aerodynamics and 120 mph speedometers. North of 80 mph the front of the car would start to lift and the steering got a funny disconnected feel; pushing past that was more aiming than driving. The only reasons any of us survived this stupidity were optimistic speedometers and a willingness to lie about how fast we actually went before backing off.

In the fall of 1947 a much higher stakes version of this game was playing out at the Muroc Army Airfield (soon to be Edwards Air Force Base) in the California dessert. Two experimental aircraft, both supersonic capable, were being flight tested by two distinctly type-A pilots.

A Car Modeler's Breakfast

Its been a while since I wrote one of these articles about where to get breakfast in the 'burgh, but its a lot easier to knock one of these out than actually doing some modeling to write about. The Trolley Barn Eatery on Library Road is a classic breakfast dive; its a single storefront in a block building that holds a handful of other businesses (its too small to qualify as a strip-mall or shopping plaza). Inside are small tables with vinyl table cloths; you order and pay at a counter in the back, then pour your own coffee and wait for the food to be served to your table.  This is breakfast at its simplest: every imaginable combination of eggs, sausage, bacon, home fries and pancakes - but the food is good and cheap.

What makes the Trolley Barn truly special is that 200 feet further down Library Road is the Castle Shannon Fire Hall, site of two big Pittsburgh model car shows: the Three Rivers Automodelers hold their show here in the fall, and in early spring the South Hills Model & Toy Show is held at the same spot. Both shows have an amazing turn out of model car vendors, and most have their stuff priced to sell - I almost always come home with something unusual. My last score was an Aurora Cobra Daytona kit - complete and unstarted - for $10!

I don't have dates for the 2014 shows yet, but I'll update this post when I do.

If you're going to one of these shows, leave a half hour early and stop at the Trolley Barn to carb-up for multiple laps around the vendor room!

Don

Things that go bump in the night...

There is something a little magical about fall in Pittsburgh. While evening comes early, the days are often sunny and warm and dry - a welcome change from the heat and humidity of summer. Many trees hold on to their leaves well into October, but the less hardy varieties add a splash of color and the wonderful smell of fallen leaves to the air.  Its a great time to be outside.

Getting the final bits of yard work done - raking leaves, mowing the grass one last time, putting the grill and lawn chairs away - often keeps you outside well into dusk. The shadows and thinning foliage and clear skies change the familiar horizon into something just a little spooky; along with the inevitable wave of Halloween inspired TV shows and the assortment of UFO, Bigfoot and unsolved mystery shows running continuously on the cable channels its easy to imagine glowing eyes watching you from the shrubbery or a headless horseman riding across your backyard.

So it wasn't too surprising when on an October visit to my parents in Westmoreland county (two turnpike exits east of Pittsburgh) I saw neatly printed signs planted along the roadside announcing a UFO convention at the local community college. I grew up in the area and had heard all the stories about  big hairy creatures killing big mean farm dogs and how the army hauled something out of a Kecksburg field in the middle of the night, but usually I heard those stories from my Dad and his friends on all night fishing trips, when I figured their goal was to scare the crap out of us kids so we didn't go wandering around the woods in the dark.  In high school I had close friends who lived in Kecksburg that I spent a lot of time with, and while we discussed all the mysteries of life that are important to 17 year old boys, the subject of aliens never came up. As a teenager I drove the dark back roads of Kecksburg many times and can tell you its easy to imagine all sorts of things lurking in the shadows that 1960s sealed beam headlights couldn't penetrate, but I never saw anything big and hairy or thin and grey-skinned step out on the pavement.

But now we have the internet. I came home from my parents and typed "kecksburg ufo" into Google and spent a guilty evening reading alleged eyewitness accounts and conspiracy theories about something that happened in my own backyard.  I have grave doubts any extraterrestrials dropped into Kecksburg, but it seems likely that something happened there in December of 1965.

Here is what we're reasonably sure of. About 4:45 pm on December 9th, 1965 - a Thursday evening just before sunset - a fireball blazed across the sky over Detroit and appeared to to head south over Lake Erie. More sightings came in from Ohio, from Cleveland to Columbus, including reports of grass fires started by flaming bits of something falling to the ground. I emphasize appeared to because depending on the object's trajectory it may well have dropped straight into Lake Erie, and still been visible far to the south.  Natural meteors (rocks) can enter the atmosphere at a steep angle such as this.

If the fireball was actually a piece of space junk falling out of orbit (or a reentering spacecraft), it would have entered the atmosphere at a shallow angle, essentially following the earth's surface as it shed speed and eventually fell to the ground. If this was the case, the object would have been moving at 1000s of miles per hour in the general direction of Pittsburgh, passing over Cleveland and Akron on the way.

In Kecksburg - a tiny town (really just a few farms sharing a VFD)  about 40 miles east of Pittsburgh, some kids came inside to tell their Mom they had  seen a "burning star" fall into the nearby woods; Mom looked and thought she saw a bright light in the woods. About 6:30pm - probably after the supper dishes were cleared - Mom called the story into local radio station WHJB (talk radio shows were the social networks of 1965). The radio station notified the state police. It was a dry, warm night with a full moon and the word was out:  reporters, police, volunteer firemen and curiosity seekers descended on Kecksburg en masse.

And then it gets fuzzy. Those who got there early - including WHJB announcer John Murphy - claim to have seen a few PA state troopers walking around with flashlights and a bronze-colored, bell or acorn shaped metal object about 6 feet in diameter and 10 feet long half buried in the ground in a wooded lot.  Those who arrived a little later saw armed soldiers guarding the site and warning onlookers they would be shot if they tried to go into the woods.  Some witnesses reported there were men in hazmat suits with NASA logos walking around. Much later, after most of the civilians had left, the military types used a bulldozer (where did that come from?) to load the something on to a flatbed truck that drove off into the night. The official police report issued the next day was that nothing was found the night before.

Over the years more and more witnesses have come forward to tell their stories of that night. Members of the Kecksburg VFD have told about the massive military presence that rolled into town.  A former Air Force officer claimed to have guarded the truck during a brief stay at Lockbourne AFB near Columbus Ohio, allegedly on its way to Wright Patterson AFB in Dayton (it seems a little odd that the truck would stop an hour short of its final destination). A contractor claims to have delivered a load of bricks to a Wright Patterson hangar where he caught a glimpse of a bell shaped object.

Today there is precious little proof of anything, including whether the Army was ever there.  In 1965 cameras didn't fit in your pocket, and no photos seem to have been taken. Most of the details of the story came out in interviews done for a TV show in 1990, 25 years after the event; plenty of time for records to be lost and memories to fade and shift.

There may be no proof of a recovery because it never happened. There are lots of reserve and National Guard armories scattered around southwest PA, but they are primarily training centers for part-time soldiers; there aren't teams of men and equipment sitting there waiting to deploy on a moments notice. The nearest actual Army base that could have mounted a major deployment would have been in Letterkenny PA, 120 miles east of Kecksburg. Unless the military had advance warning (unlikely, unless whatever it was was one ours) it seems doubtful any of them could have assembled a detachment of men and equipment and got them to Kecksburg by late evening.

According to some websites there are documented reports - obtained under the Freedom of Information Act - indicating that the Air Force sent 3 men from the Oakdale PA radar station to recover whatever had fallen there. Oakdale is just south of the main Pittsburgh airport and about 50 miles west of Kecksburg; until 1969 the Air Force had an air defense radar there to guide fighter planes to Soviet bombers should the Cold War ever turn hot. You can find reports from the Oakdale site online suggesting that investigating stuff that may have fallen from the sky and answering queries from UFO buffs was a common and less than rewarding job for the unit. Oakdale was just an hour away from Kecksburg; that would have fit the time line. It seems likely that the 3 airmen from Oakdale (maybe they took a few extra men to help guard the site) were the only military there, and the stories of a large Army presence were exaggerated by time and imagination.

But did they find anything in those woods?  Or did an Air Force truck roll out of Kecksburg loaded with nothing more than the search lights and shovels and winches they brought with them? And if it was a piece of space junk, why all the secrecy?

Remember that in the early 1960s both the US and USSR were launching lots of stuff into space. Mixed in with the scientific probes and commercial communication satellites were spy satellites, military communication and navigation satellites and probably a few missile component tests. But aside from manned spacecraft, the only things meant to come back from space were film canisters and warheads. Moreover, the Soviets had been hinting they had an ICBM with fractional orbit capability that could lob a nuke around the south pole into the US, undetected by the north facing early warning radars - a development that would have seriously derailed the "mutually assured destruction" doctrine that was seen as the only thing preventing WWIII. Against that backdrop, anything that reentered the atmosphere and made it to the ground in one piece would have been extremely interesting to the military and men in black suits, and unlikely to ever be declassified; you'll have to make up your own mind about what happened in Kecksburg.

Obligatory scale modeling reference: Are you a military vehicle modeler who is tired of the SciFi modelers having all the fun lighting up their models with LEDs? How about building a deuce-and-a-half with a tarp covered load that glows and pulses blue light? Put it on a base with some trees and a Kecksburg road sign. I'd love to see that diorama! Imagine the fun of convincing the judges it does not belong in the Sci-Fi category. And if someone tells you the details are wrong, ask him exactly how he knows?

Don