Cars and Chips...

There were two classes of slot cars: the first was the type that came with the original set: they moved slow, but probably to scale. The back ends fish-tailed all over the place. The outside lane as a dream if you had the guard rails in place and a nightmare if you didn't. There was a little white one called the Chapperelle. Then there were the "curve huggers" with the ridiculous bottom magnets that would let the cars drive up a wall, I'm guessing. Looking throught he Eatons Christmas catalogue, at the toy sections in the fall, was usually enough to remind us that the set was in the crawl space, and out it came again.

Spring drive trains. Nasty little metal track connector pieces. Boring layouts, with not enough track. I think the set came with 8 curves, and 4 straight pieces: enough to from an oval. So combining the two sets meant getting any distance at all meant left curve, right curve, left curve, right curve...

250g bags of Hostess Mexican Hot Bar-B-Q chips. Ah, yes. They costs 69 cents. Lots of penny candy. Technically, closer than BATES, as it was really only one block away, not two. But up that steep hill! A slide top freezer with popsicles and mr-freezee for a nickle each. The real Ice Cream treats cost way more. Like, a dime.

Bates was just too poorly maintained to be anyplace a kid wanted to go. It was dark, and dingy and cramped. The big red letters on the plain sign out front. "B A T E S", I'm glad none of us was terribly familiar with Hitchcock's Psycho. The place was finally torn down in the early 80s, and Amir Ismail opened up a new convenience store, at which I spent a summer stocking the milk cooler and hauling about a million cases of 750ml Pepsi from his minivan to the basement. Why buy a conveyer or an elevator when you had $4/hr staff to schlep stuff around...

It was always true that I followed the instructions to the letter, and Lorne just put the models together. And his always looked way better than mine. All these years later, I do know why. I had no patience to wait for the painting. I just wanted to slap the thing together and put on the decals. More decals meant a more colourful model. But as a hobby, the detail painting made the whole thing. One of my best models was the 747 with the Space Shuttle on the back. I actually masked the fuselage, and SPRAY PAINTED that model silver. It looked sharp. 'Course, we shot it up just the same at the quarry with dad's .22 rifle. Later on, I built an x-wing, which looked pretty good. And for some reason, I've got black and white photos of it chasing the Darth Vader Tie fighter across the basement carpet. Why was I shooting b&w in 1978?