As a young boy I loved airplanes. It was in the late ’40s and early ’50s, the era when jets were replacing props. Except for the Douglas Skyraider (a great, homely, radial-engine, taildragging behemoth later to be a favorite of some pilots in Vietnam because it could shrug off so much punishment), the airplanes I sighed over were jets. I don’t know if it was my first plastic model, but it may well have been, because I remember the agony of impatience in which I accompanied my mother and grandmother on an interminable visit to the May Co. on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles while a newly purchased kit for a P-80 Shooting Star waited beside me on the back seat of my grandfather’s ’51 Chevrolet. The taupe fabric of those seats felt as if it could give you rug burn.
Silver paint, it turned out, was hard for a young kid to apply convincingly — not that I had done too elegant a job of gluing the parts together in the first place. But no matter. It was probably from that airplane, or from the similar but less graceful F-94, that I contracted the fondness for tip tanks that lurked in me undetected until I started designing my own planes years later. There they were again, for no reason other than that some fighter of the Korean War era with an excessively thirsty turbojet engine had had them.
