Hi Nick, your post struck a chord with me, especially as I'm now approaching my 'three score years and ten'.
As you said, back in the day every town would have a decent model shop, larger towns might have more than one. The German (West Germany as it was then) kits in the window, from firms such as Graupner and Robbe, were generally out of most modellers’ price range, so it was the British Aerokits and Veron ranges.
If you aspired to a radio set then in those days before credit cards it would be purchased ‘on the drip’, a hire purchase agreement. Today’s radio gear is way cheaper and much more reliable, although the sets are so ‘feature rich’ that it takes a slog through the manual to boil it down to a basic rudder and throttle setup.
Aerokits were solidly built to cope with the vibration from a marine diesel, remember ED or Frog, starting one could sometimes be a bit problematic. Electric motive power is now on a different planet, just switch on and go. Some Sunday mornings the ED Racer just wouldn’t start, but there would always be a pondside expert on hand, dressed in shirt, tie and a sports jacket, smoking a pipe with a waft of Golden Virginia, who backed off the compression a quarter of a turn and started it with one flick of the leather bootlace starting cord.
We now have access to a vast range of GRP hulls, and glue and paint technology make building easier and quicker, so we’ve never had it so good, but, through rose-tinted specs the good old days were pretty good as well.
Cheers,
Mike
