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B: Another interesting company Ron Morris wants information on is Shelley.
N: Armour Shelly. We used to buy from him in the early days, I'm talking about the mid-thirties, he made World War I bombs that you would attach to your solid model airplane. After WWI, he made machine guns and all kinds of castings. Eventually, he began to make castings for HO model railroads.
B: I remember visiting them in a rundown shop on Gates Ave. in Brooklyn, after WWII. Did they make an HO ore car?
N: Yes, they did it because it was a casting. You know the two sides and the end. He had all these sludge molds. I used to go out there quite often. He was an interesting guy, and he wanted to get into model airplanes in a big way. Eventually, he created a fuselage that was not made of paper covered wood like everybody else. He took cheese cloth and wrapped it with wax or something and molded it and it was called Shelley Tex. That meant you could build up the whole fuselage. It was rubber band powered and had a one piece wing that was made out of Shelley Tex which was joined right at the fuselage.
B: I believe Bowser Manufacturing purchased their molds and are still using them. Another early railroad manufacturer was Rollin Lobaugh.
N: Lobaugh was in California. A very interesting man, he was in the San Francisco area, out on the Peninsula. The interesting part in going to see him - his wife used to take a handkerchief and rub it across the drapes and say, "See, I haven't cleaned the drapes in three years and there's not a bit of dust on them." Out on the Peninsula, you had the fog and you had no dust at all. He was an interesting manufacturer because he made O gauge and he made it beautifully. But his price didn't make it sufficiently marketable to become a growth company. It was a hobby type of company. Lobaugh was superb merchandise, but certainly not made in volume.
B: Another early company was Megow.
N: Fred Megow was in Philadelphia. He was one of those model airplane men who eventually made some 69 cent railroad kits and also made some buildings. He started with 10 cents, 15 cents, 50 cents, and 1 dollar airplane kits. He and Comet were competitors, they were the two biggest competitors. Comet in Chicago, Megow in Philadelphia.
B: When did Testors get into the act?
N: Mills Testor was from Rockwood, IL. That's where the Swedish population was in Illinois. In Rockwood, if you look in the phone book, you aren't going to find any Smiths. He really started in model cement. Testor was in the nail polish and shoe polish business originally, and he went bankrupt. He used to supply Woolworth's and the 5 and 10's eventually broke him because of the prices. When they did that, he got into the glue business for models and then paint right after that. He grew from there because he was a very energetic, hard working guy. He wasn't going to let the fact that he had failed in one field put him down.
B: Didn't they call glue and paint dope in those days?
N: Yes, they used to call any paint dope because in the beginning airplanes were covered with cloth. To get them stretched and to paint them, they had a paint that was called dope. In the real or prototype airplane field, the paint was also called dope. So, the model industry called it dope as well, because it would do to paper what it did to the cloth on the real airplane, it would shrink it. They didn't call it dope because of the models, it was called dope on the real aircraft. The Berry Brothers in Detroit were the biggest manufacturers of paint for aircraft at that time - they were called Berry Loid. We used to get money from them to help sponsor model airplane contests.
B: Another name that seemed to stay around for only a short while was Midland Models in Scotch Plains, NJ.
N: Oh yes, Fred Shimidoin. Very interesting, meticulous sort of guy. Had a little moustache, very dapper, a very good, hard working manufacturer. He was really excellent. He was very difficult to deal with. At one time, I think he made cork roadbed. He played a big part for about seven years.
B: Do you know Tony Koveleski?
N: Yes, sure. Tony Koveleski is actually Oscar Koveleski's father. Oscar is a race car driver. Tony had a big grocery store in Scranton, PA, and at one time, the President of Comet Airplanes, who would open an account anywhere, was going through Scranton. It was raining hard and he had to eat lunch. In those days, we all ate lunch by buying a loaf of bread and bologna and we would eat in the car. After all, nobody had a lot of money. He went into Tony's grocery store and looking at this young guy said, for crying out loud, what's a young guy doing slicing bologna and bread, you should be in the model airplane business. And guess what? He made Tony a distributor and he became Scranton Hobby Distributors. That's how he started.
B: He made those little car kits, Hudson Miniatures. Louis Hertz dedicated his book, The Complete Book of Building and Collecting Model Automobiles to Tony, "An old friend and the man who, more than any other, spark-plugged today's model automobile enthusiasm." I think he sold them later to Revell.
N: No, Revell made them in plastic. They didn't buy them at all. He could not sell them to anybody, because the other people all invested and made them in plastic. He made them beautifully. I remember we were the first ones to advertise them in Esquire Magazine, and we did very well with them, because it was a novelty then. He is still around. Do you see him?
B: Oh yes, Tony is a train and toy collector. He goes to York and we see him at the flea markets. He still loves to tell his Polish Uncle Louie jokes.
N: His wife, Doris, at that time she was his girlfriend, and the reason the kits were called Hudson was because her name was Doris Hudson. I knew him very well. You know we were all friends in those days, because we did not have time to make friends with anybody else. This was not only the way we earned our living, this was also our social life.
B: They all influenced each other?
N: That's right and we were always with one another. It was not easy, and on the other hand, I would say we really enjoyed what we all did We felt we were playing a part in something. We weren't quite sure what it was.
B: Carmen Webster, of Model Railroad Equipment Corp., in NYC, did she cooperate or was she only out for herself?
N: No, she came into the hobby with a bitter pill to swallow because of her husband. He worked for the phone company and on the side had a store. He was the only guy we could get good three way telephone switches from. His name was Frank Webster. What happened was that Carmen and he didn't get along. She was a secretary somewhere in the city and he ran the store. One day, he came over and said to me, " Listen I'm going to be gone. I'm going to disappear. I can't stand my home life any more and I'm going to go to California." So, he walked out. The war was just beginning and he went out to California and he made wooden western wagon kits. Carmen took over the store. She really had to struggle and she had to use all her wiles to get merchandise. For instance, Fred O'Donagal of Exacto, called me up and said, "Who is this woman? We can't sell her anything. We are only taking care of the customers we had before the shortages started." I said, she had an unusual situation and he said, "Well, I'm sorry, I just can't do anything for her. But she is so persistent I had to find out who she was." She was indeed persistent. She used to come to our place to buy track. We couldn't sell her much because she wasn't a customer of ours either. So, she used to send the customers to us who didn't need that much track and gave them money, and they would buy a thousand feet of rail and take it to her. She didn't have it that easy, but nobody actually made it hard for her. We all knew each other but she fought like a tigress and was able to manage through the war. Then, after the war, her business really took off.
B: She did promote the hobby a great deal.
N: Yes, she had the catalog and she advertised. Later on, she came into the Hobby Association. Then, she became Chairman of the Promotions Committee. She's the one that came up with the idea of putting model railroad magazines into the dentists' offices and she ran that for the industry. She did nice work as a Committee woman I liked Carmen. You know I had my battles with her, but I liked her.
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