Back in 70s/80s America building plastic models was just what kids did. With very little parental supervision or input. Most of my neighborhood friends were into planes that they built quickly, sloppily and with no paint. Before the glue was even dry, they’d be out in the backyard blowing them up with firecrackers! Again, little supervision.
I was about 4 or 5 when we visited Plymouth and I saw the Mayflower replica for the first time. A Revell kit of her came home with us and I proceeded to do an atrocious job of painting and constructing her. I still remember my sense of pride and accomplishment.
A little later, around the age of 7, we visited the USS Constitution in Boston. This would have been just a few years after the Bicentennial. Another Revell kit (not the big 1:96 version) came home. By now, wooden ships had lit a fire in me, and I took much more care in building this model. My father helped with the detail painting, and my mother, who made clothing as a hobby, helped with the rigging. She rigged the whole model, actually.
A year later, in 1980, a new family moved-in next door. The father, Mark Hansen, would have been around 40 at the time. I was instantly fascinated by Mr. Hansen. He was often out in the yard with his RC tanks, or in the garage building black powder guns from kits. He was a friendly guy, and never seemed to mind company and an inquisitive mind.
His hobby room, where the modeling happened, was expansive. One whole wall was filled with completed models of WWII aircraft and tanks and supporting vehicles. There were a smattering of smaller scale plastic sailing ships, like the smaller scale Victory, and Constitution. Mr. Hansen’s models were carefully and professionally made.
At the time I met him, he had already build Heller’s La Sirene, which was in a case of his own making, and he was building the Royal Louis. This was my introduction to French naval architecture. Mr. Hansen had, by this time, seen some of my earlier efforts, and he began to educate me on what makes for a more realistic sailing ship model.
The piece-de-resistance, however, was the original pressing of Heller’s Soleil Royal at the top of his stache-shelving. I only had to see the side-box art to become instantly transfixed by this vessel, and thus a lifelong obsessive passion was born.
Mr. Hansen had two boys of his own, a little younger than me, and his plan was to build the SR in his retirement. Sadly, after an adulthood of smoking and casting lead bullets in his inadequately ventilated garage, Mr. Hansen died before reaching retirement.
It is his pressing of the kit that I am building right now, at this stage in life, when my own kids are a bit older and needing me less and less. He was a true mentor to me at an early stage in life when my own father and I didn’t seem to have much in common. He never expressed exasperation that I was a near constant fixture in his garage, asking endless questions, and just watching what he did with great fascination.
I will always remember his experiment to faux tiger-stripe the CVA percussion double-gun with stain and a fine sable brush. It came out pretty damn well! He even taught me basic woodworking and metalworking as I built my own kit Pennsylvania rifle.
He then taught me how to load, shoot and care for my rifle, thus igniting another abiding passion of mine - black powder firearms.
Anyway, Mr. Hansen is the person I think about as I build this model and it is to his memory that I have dedicated the project.