WHEN IT'S SOMEONE YOU KNOW

You know me here because, when I was 11 months old - according to my mother - we were sitting in a park in Denver, when a P-38 flew over (it’s an airplane that’s so distinctive in design that even my mother knew what it was) and I pointed up and screamed “O-pane!” It was my first word.

My love affair with airplanes ever since has defined my life; I write about them, I’ve flown in everything from a World War I Curtiss Jenny to an F-4E Phantom and taken photographs of them. I’ve met the people who flew them. I’ve long ago lost count of how many models of them I have built.

When I was old enough to sit on a stool by my father’s workbench down in the basement, he built models for me. They were made of wood and took him a couple weeks to shape, glue together and paint. They took me three or four weeks to break.

I recall being allowed to build my first one at around age six. It too was wood, but soon models made of plastic began to appear, and they were easier. I continued. My father put a big peg board up on the wall in my bedroom and I hung them there by their tails. The inevitable breakage only resulted in space for new ones.

Soon I asked questions about them. “What did that one do?” My father’s answer to all my questions was always a trip to the library, to get a book with the answer inside. My grandmothers, both teachers, taught me to read at age four. No one knew then that I was Aspergian, which meant that I had near-total recall for anything that interested me (and anything that didn’t went in one ear and out the other, causing no end of problems since parents, teachers, and other authority figures all believed those things were The Important Things). I asked more questions: “What was that war like?” “Why did that happen?” Eventually I went down the rabbit hole of history all the way to Ur, the first city-state. And I remembered most of it. I was using my father’s adult library card that let me check out ten books at a time, so I didn’t have to go over to the Eugene Field Library (which in those days was actually Eugene Field’s house) more than twice a month. By the time I was 12, I was allowed to ride the Number 5 bus all the way down to the Denver Civic Center and spend a Saturday at the Denver Public Library main branch. I learned much more that way than I ever did in a classroom.

And I continued to build models. I even continued the trips to the library and the hobby shop after I discovered girls, a point when most boys give that up.

Back in the late 1970s, I discovered that there were guys who lived in Eastern Europe on the other side of the Iron Curtain, who were creating some pretty interesting models. They were cut off from modeling in the West, so they created their own. Injection molding production technology was primitive, so many were done as vacuforms, though some of them advanced to actual injection molded kits. You couldn’t buy one, but you could trade. I got to know a guy in Czechoslovakia, and sent him blue jeans and records in return for models. It turns out, that made him a Big Deal among his friends; after the Velvet Revolution, he became a politician there. I guess the blue jeans and rock ‘n’ roll records were my blow against the evil empire.

After the end of the Cold War, Prague became the “bleeding edge” of interesting scale model creation and production. It’s still “up there,” and some of the very best, most accurate, good looking models come with their boxes marked “Made in the Czech Republic.”

Cut to: 1997. The dawn of the internet.

She Who Must Be Obeyed had been downsized from her job at ABC News and was taking a class in computer graphics, where she was introduced to the internet. She told me about it. I wasn’t particularly interested. So she went looking around and found some sites put up by scale modelers about their models, and showed them to me.

Those interested me.

Among the sites was a little place inhabiting one of those AOL sites - ten megabytes of space for each of the five names one could have on an AOL account. Modeling Madness. The guy who did it used a copy of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin becomes discouraged in his attempt to build a model, for the opening graphic. Scott Van Aken and I became friends, and I ended up contributing reviews to the site.

That was 25 years ago. I still do that, every week. And over all those years, I have gotten to know a lot of other modelers, literally all over the world. Many of them have become very good friends, who I have known for more years than many long-term friends here in Real World. It turns out, we’re all pretty much alike, which is a good basis for starting a friendship.

Eventually, the "history section” in the reviews got noticed by an editor at Osprey Publishing looking for new authors, with the result that ten years later, I am a well-known military history author. All because of model airplanes.

Back about 20 years ago, kits started appearing from another location in Eastern Europe. Ukraine. While the Czechs were commercially-oriented enough to produce kits of “popular” (i.e., well-known) subjects, the guys in Kyiv (they’re almost all in Kyiv) were enthusiasts and they did kits of subjects they wanted to see, hang the commerciality. Many were very obscure to anyone other than a dedicated Subject Matter Geek. They were beautifully done, and around the world, modelers who wanted something besides Mustangs and Spitfires and Messerschmitts were happy to buy them. I became a promoter of them through my reviews at Modeling Madness, and as a result made a number of friends there.

Thus, the war has been very personal to me. It’s hard to believe that only three weeks ago, the big topic of discussion between me and my friends there was their coming “spring release” kits - all of which were high on my list of Things I Am Unlikely To Ever See Done, which I was anticipating receiving with “bated breath” as they say. And then the next day the world changed. Twenty-one “decades” later, it feels impossible that such conversations and events ever happened.

Among the Ukrainian model geeks I got to know was a guy named Valery Grigorenko. An artist who did most of the kit box cover art for Roden Models, one of the leading companies there. I once mentioned on an internet discussion group that all my cats were caught as feral kittens and domesticated, and that I had found homes for the others I had domesticated, when we had a colony of “community cats” where we lived. Valery responded that he did the same thing. A connection closer than others was immediately made.

I was really happy yesterday morning, to learn my friends there were all OK, when I got a response to the last email I had sent out with the header “Are you OK?”

And then last night, I saw the page that’s hyperlinked below. Valery Grigorenko, modeler and artist, was killed in Kyiv last week in the shelling. Knowing Valery, the most likely reason he was above ground in his yard, where he died, was because he was taking food to his friends, the feral cats that live in his neighborhood. They don’t know that war means you can’t get fed any more because it’s not safe. So he was probably out there, caring for them.

It’s hard to look at the TV and see the destruction. It’s harder when one of the departed is someone you know. A guy who enjoyed building models, painting, and caring for cats.

God I hate Vladimir Putin.

If you’d like to see some of Valery’s cover art, you can go here:

https://www.themodellingnews.com/2022/03/vale-influential-model-artist-valery.html