Anyone remember these shops?

Pappy

Pappy

Living the Dream
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Moved back to NY from Florida. 🤓 2025
As a young boy, one of my favorite places to go was a Hobby Shop. There was one on King St., in my hometown, that was a part of ones home and if they were home, they were open. I would finish my paper route and quite often visit their shop before I went home. I was in to building balsa wood airplane models. The shop I visited looked almost like the one I've posted.
 

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When I was in high school, my cousin and I use to build/paint model cars. For the last couple of years, wife had a little craft going on during the Christmas holidays that we used local Hobby Shops for........collected pine cones from the trees around our apt. complex and turned them into Christmas Trees w/paint-sparkly stuff added an Angel or Cross to the top. They turned out great! This last Christmas, she made Seashell pictures out of real seashells. Some of the seashells she had collected and others she bought. They were great looking as well.
 

Back in the fifties, when jet planes were becoming popular, I had several models, I built, hanging from my bedroom ceiling. Some of the first fighter jets I remember were the F-80 and the F-86. Real advanced jets for the time.

I also use to buy small bags of plaster of Paris and make model cars in a rubber form designed for that purpose. I would place steel axles and rubber tires in place and pour the plaser into the form. Let it set, paint and enjoy your fleet of autos.
 
There's still a couple of hobby shops in my area, it is fun to visit them, especially the ones with model train setups to watch. :cool:
 
Oh yes, Love them. A good friend of mine owns one and it's HUGE! If he doesn't carry it, it isn't made. Every scale, every size etc.
I've built many of the kits.
 
I loved hobby shops. I broke up probably 6 of those lightweight (Balsa) planes you launched with a "slingshot" and they had a prop and it used a wound up rubber band. Those hobby shops were a kids idea of heaven.
 
SeaBreeze said:
There's still a couple of hobby shops in my area, it is fun to visit them, especially the ones with model train setups to watch. :cool:
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I was just about to write something similar, get out of my head. LOL! I'm not into these things, but, when I've been dragged into one of those shops, I always get a kick out of the trains going around the tracks, I also don't mind taking over the remote controls of those toy cars and airplanes. :D I was fond of both dolls and the remote control toys as a kid.

Oh and yep, I see hobby shops around these parts and everywhere else I've lived over the years.
 
Yes there's still a few old fashioned ones around here too but mainly they've been taken over by the Huge Hobbycraft superstores.....still fun to visit, but not got the same atmosphere at all as the little independents ...however the amount of stock they carry is astonishing, hobbies you never knew even existed much less tried.
Do you have Hobbycraft in the US and Canada?
 
We used to have little neighborhood hobby shops that seemed to sell mostly model airplane kits and the like and there was a model railroad shop down the street from me until just a few years ago. Now we have a monster hobby superstore called Michael's which stocks everything you could possibly imagine, but doesn't sell online, and hard for me to get to. Most of the little neighborhood fabric, wool and bead making shops are gone too. We used to have a place called Lewiscraft for years, but sadly it went under too. I'll look for Hobbycraft, maybe they do online sales. Nowadays I get supplies via Amazon. Art supply stores seem to be still doing OK though.
 
Have you seen those German layouts on the internet?

One is an airport with planes taking off and landing etc. The other is a train layout with trains running every which way.

I don't have the urls but you might find them on U-tube.
 
Falcon said:
Have you seen those German layouts on the internet?

One is an airport with planes taking off and landing etc. The other is a train layout with trains running every which way.

I don't have the urls but you might find them on U-tube.
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You were a pilot so gliders and models probably seem silly. Do you ever fly now, Falcon?
 
Pappy, I'm not familiar with Cleveland models, but they look like they might be out of wood. Does anybody remember Strombecker kits? They made a line of WWII planes. They were made out of pine and you had to sand the pieces into final shape. I was a kid, and getting the engines to fit into the wings of a B17 or B24, was murder!
 
Underock1 said:
Pappy, I'm not familiar with Cleveland models, but they look like they might be out of wood. Does anybody remember Strombecker kits? They made a line of WWII planes. They were made out of pine and you had to sand the pieces into final shape. I was a kid, and getting the engines to fit into the wings of a B17 or B24, was murder!
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Thanks, Pappy. I built that kit, and just about all the others throughout WWII. My very first model was a P39 Airocobra. The last one was a B29, with a wingspan so wide that I had to angle it in order to "fly" it through the doorway. By the end of the war we had a whole cardboard closet filled with these things.
 
I did model cars that had the plastic parts on a piece of plastic that had to be broken or torn off. We used toothpicks to put the glue on, so it wouldn't run out over the edges and ruin the paint. I never knew that sniffing glue would make a person woozy, until I became that way one day and my Mom asked me what's wrong? I told her that I was feeling woozy and dizzy. She told me to put the glue down and take a walk outside. Felt better after that. The problem with the glue was that it would sometimes harden if the cap wan't put back on correctly.

I also built a couple planes that were powered by some special type of fuel that we bought in a can. The planes were attached to a string. I don't remember seeing RC planes back then, but they may have had them.
 
I have about ten plastic WWI planes built, but I learned my lesson. They are 1/72nd scale with 2" wing spans.
I have another dozen, plus a couple of galleons to be built "some day". Lol!
 
I was born more into the plastic age, so I remember primarily those kits. Our local hobby shops carried the balsa plane kits, model rockets (Estes), HO trains and HO slot cars. They also carried chemistry set supplies, and being a certified junior mad scientist I spent a lot of money on those.

Primarily I was a plastic car and monster-maker (there was an entire line of Hollywood monsters you could build), with the rockets and slot cars as the more expensive pursuits when I could afford them.
 
Although I'm enjoying all these nostalgic memories of balsa wood and tissue paper model planes with glow plug engines that hardly ever ran. But at the same time I'm really impressed with the contemporary RC models that really knock your socks off. They sure look like fun to fly.
 

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