Introduction

When I was a kid, I built model cars with blinding fury but too-little craftsmanship. It was one of my greatest childhood aspirations to enter a contest where my models could be displayed with the work of other hobbyists and, perhaps, to win a prize. To me, there was always something wonderful about the prospect of crafting a custom model car or hot rod and then competing with other modelers. The image of a room full of brightly-painted models, all uniquely styled or restyled by their builders, carried a fascination for me from early on.

As I look back, I don't know that I can pinpoint or fully appreciate the reasons I was transfixed by model car building. Certainly, model kits were everywhere in the early Sixties. From grocery and drug stores, hardware and department stores and those glorious emporiums of childhood fantasy and inspiration — hobby shops — it was almost impossible to escape the model car hobby.  Every cent of my allowance and lawn mowing monies were spent, immediately, on the latest kits, magazines, cans of Pactra or AMT paint, parts packs, or on a wide array of other hobby items. My dad could be cajoled into purchasing an AMT 1961 Galaxie Starliner kit when my mother refused to indulge me with a Monogram Yellow Jacket. Or, more fundamentally, perhaps building model cars was an outlet for a deep need to be creative.

Weekly bike rides to K-Fisher Drug in rural Salt Lake County in the early Sixties certainly fed my hobby habit: The place was full of models, little bottles of brush-on paints, tubes of Revell glue and AMT putty and Monte, Revell, AMT and Aurora parts paks. As importantly, the racks were filled in the first half of the Sixties with the latest issues of Car Model, Model Car Science, Rod and Custom Models, Model Car Illustrated and Model Car & Track magazines — all of which fueled my enthusiasm and challenged me to improve my skills.   There, I read of the model building exploits of Augie Hiscano, Richard Johnson, Bob Paeth, Dennis Doty, Oscar Koveleski, Dave Shuklis, Auto World's "Smitty" (Robert Smith), Jim Keeler, Tom McEnteer, Jose Rodriguez, Carl Dunn, the Yonts brothers, Mike Baltes, Tom Davison, Bob Sifferd, Al Gaby, Lonio Stern, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth and the dozens of other personalities that populated those magazines more than three decades ago. Those publications also told of many contests, the most public of which was the Revell-Pactra extravaganza in which the best models from across the country were judged by many of those legends.   It was hard for a car-crazy kid to ignore those provocations.

My appetite for model cars extended well beyond the territorial boundaries of Utah. When my family and I would visit my grandmother in Alameda, California, she always took me to a local hobby shop to buy a model Car kit and supplies. That place was amazing: though very small, every vertical and horizontal surface of the shop was covered with some sort of hobby item. Photos of real custom cars,  adorned the walls and Revell Parts Paks overflowed their bins. Glue and putty were everywhere, and the counter was administered by a genial old fellow who seemed, to a kid, to know an awful lot about model Car building (though, in retrospect, I don't recall seeing any of his models). Of course, I had more in mind than just getting a kit and beating a retreat when I went to that hobby shop in Alameda. It was also the experience the sheer fun of being there. I often stayed, well past the time that my purchases had been bagged, to enjoy the unbelievable array of Roth, Barris, Winfield, Starbird, Cushenberry and Alexander Brothers-influenced kits and the hundreds of other hobby products available in the early-to-mid Sixties.  At any hobby store, whether in that hobby store in California, or at Skip's Hobby or Hammond's Hobby in suburban Salt Lake County,  there was advice aplenty, and the older boys could be counted upon to dish out equal amounts of derision and advice when presented with the completed model of a younger builder. It was a magical time and place, and the transfixing memories and magic of those experiences would influence my entire life.

Perhaps my obsession can be traced to the unrelenting publicity accorded 1:1 custom car and rod building in the late Fifties through the mid-Sixties. Or maybe it was the emergence of the car personalities. After all, seeing Ed Roth in a top hat scrunched down in the Beatnik Bandit must have appealed to a rebellious kid. Maybe it was something as immodest as imagining me at the tiller of Starbird's Predicta, or blasting down Van Nuys Boulevard in Winfield's Jade Idol, or cruising Salt Lake's Van Winkle Boulevard in Cushenberry's Marquis. I don't know that I will ever know. But no matter; I was hooked early, and it has been a lifelong obsession.

One day in early 1962, the Salt Lake City's drug store's front windows were filled with posters for the First Revell-Pactra Open Model Car Contests and the checkout counter bristled with a neat pile of entry forms, ready to be tossed into the sack containing an eager kid's dreams of building a beautiful model car and winning a prize! I remember gazing at the contest announcements, wondering, yearning: Could I compete? A hope-filled purchase of a new supply of models, paint and glue led to weeks of furious building, the hope and goal of successfully competing in that national show always brightly in my mind: The drumbeat was always there, moment after moment, in school, at breakfast, in the shower, when cutting lawns, all the time without respite. I dreamed of competing and winning as I applied dozens of coats of Pactra candy root beer to inexpertly-crafted custom bodies and pulled thread through wax to create ignition wires. The trouble was, of course, that I wasn't a very good modeler. In fact, I was probably awful. It would be six years before I ever won an award!

The lack of skill really didn't matter then — it was the dream of competing in a national contest with our models that animated my friends and me as we continued to build model cars, entering them in the monthly contests that the proprietor held following his successful experience with the 1962 Revell-Pactra I national contest. My models, those of four school chums and the other contestants' entries vied for shelf space in that store with home remedies, appetite suppressants and greeting cards. Our models — all crude by any measure but heartfelt — were present in quantity: Starbird customs by Monogram, AMT annual releases burdened with glue-on fins and gaudy decals, Revell replicas of Roth's creations, Johan's Cadillacs and an occasional soapbar model. To my friends and me, our models were triumphant — our efforts were all jewels in a sea of mundane merchandise. But, despite our ongoing series of entries and glassy-eyed enthusiasm, not one of my friends or I placed in any of the Revell-Pactra contests, nor in the Revell-Testor contests, all of which were all well-covered in Car Model, Model Car Science, Model Car Illustrated and Car Model magazine's "Model Champions." But that did not seem to matter much then — building model cars did.

Though I was not to win a contest until I was 17 years old (and then at a Salt Lake City Woolworth store contest judged by the hardware salesman who liked my 1968 Corvette roadster), the experience of hard work, patience and a commitment to trying to improve my building skills greatly influenced my academic, hobby, professional and other experiences later in life. My personality has been indelibly shaped by those halcyon years; it is certainly true that adults are prisoners of their childhoods.

As I grew older, my hobby interests expanded to include the thought of producing a national model car contest where hobbyists of great passion could compete in an atmosphere free of bias, share their ardor for the hobby and develop building skills by learning from other modelers. That preoccupation sounds odd, perhaps, growing up as I did in the turbulent Sixties. As with some other members of my generation, the activities of my high school and college years were occasionally shared with Vietnam War protests and civil rights marches.  More than once, I was late for a date because the last coat of Pactra clear gloss had to be applied.   As a dutifully rebellious college student, I read Martin Buber and Sartre, and did many — but not all — of the thousand other things that characterized youth in the late Sixties and early Seventies. But always — always — there was the constant background drumbeat of my own composition: attempting to construct realistic miniature automobiles and hosting a gathering of equally -serious builders. Those dreams percolated during the many building sessions that punctuated the many years I spent in college.  In fact, amid all the classes, some friends and I had the chance to organize the Utah Model Car Association in 1970   This is the earliest photo of an UMCA activity: From left to right, there is Don Davis, the author and Ken Hansen.  From those influences and predilections arose the desire (perhaps obsession would be a more apt description) to present a contest in that dreamed-of format — a desire that ultimately led to the establishment of the GSL International Model Car Championship.

However, the real impetus to actually host that contest of my dreams began with a defeat brought about by youthful enthusiasm and arrogance. Contrary to common opinion, GSL did not leap into existence, fully-formed and successful, but was built, event by event, upon the ruins of a stillborn national contest. As with other aspects of human experience, GSL was marked by slow growth, capitalizing on early successes and overcoming failures. The cumulative effect of those successes and failures disciplined and textured the GSL Championships.

To give needed perspective to this tale, some additional history must be told.  During law school in the early seventies, I had made the acquaintance of Jim Keeler, who had just moved to Salt Lake City following a stint as product manager at Aurora in New York.  Jim was a boyhood hero of mine because of his building prowess and participation in the hobby: His work for Revell in the early Sixties, and his involvement (along with Bob Paeth) with the Revell-Pactra model car contests in 1963 and 1964, were the basis of my admiration for him.8  From Jim, I heard about the experiences of judging a contest the size of the Revell-Pactra event. As a result of that background knowledge, Jim and I drafted contest rules and judging criteria in 1978 for Utah Model Car Association contests, and that effort stimulated further serious thinking in me about the outlines of a national scale vehicle contest.

During the mid-seventies, I had also begun to write model car articles for International Modeler, (later retitled Special Effects Modeler when owner Brick Price began creating models for motion pictures).  At that time, I made the acquaintance of Dennis Doty and later, through Dennis, Tim Boyd (who had just started his long association with Street Rodder), Al Cozby, Jeff Bednar, Andy Martin, Chuck Helppie, Rick Hanmore, John McCann and Wayne Saunders. By the time I had graduated from law school in 1976, I was corresponding regularly with those guys, and our discussions sometimes turned to the then-current MPC model car contest series. Other than the Salt Lake City's MPC contests (where I won paint awards), my exposure to the contest series was limited; my knowledge came mostly from MPC veterans Tim Boyd and Chuck Helppie, who told me of the backroom political machinations and building-style bias of the MPC contest series.

My interest in creating a new contest was fueled by these stories about the MPC series. Though I never attended an MPC Finale, I was particularly disillusioned and appalled by the stories I heard about certain aspects of that contest series that occurred from time to time. For instance, I learned how contestants and their entries were treated with disrespect — judging once occurred in a former mens' lavatory — and the outcome sometimes was affected by political considerations and the often intense wrangling between some contestants. Moreover, the fact that some styles of building appeared to be favored over others called into question the objectivity and fairness of the contest. In my mind, there was something inherently wrong about effectively forcing competitors into favored, narrow categories in order to win. It is unlikely, for instance, that a sophisticated, scratchbuilt '57 Rambler American four door would have ever won any MPC award, regardless of the level of craftsmanship. Stunting creativity and artistic freedom seemed at odds with the goal of encouraging individual expression and technical achievement. That growing perspective and belief, combined with the tales from Tim and Chuck, persuaded me, in 1978, that it was time to pursue my dream of creating and hosting a national contest.

At about that same time, I unintentionally participated in a bit of shenanigans the results of which played out at the last MPC Finale in 1979.  An acquaintance in the UMCA visited my house, one night in the summer of 1978, and asked me to paint his 1/16 scale Dodge Charger model which, he assured me, would only find its way into his display case. Well, I painted his model and he left, several hours later, with a freshly-painted body and instructions on how to rub out the lacquer. Later, when I saw the coverage on the last MPC contest, I discovered, to my great chagrin and embarrassment, that the same model that I painted was the national Best Paint winner and also placed Fourth ahead of other modelers! That event emphasized to me the realization that, for a contest to ultimately succeed in serving the modeling public, both judges and contestants had to possess and exhibit impeccable ethics and be vigilant for the possibility of inadvertent or intentional wrongdoing.

After considering all of this, I started to more seriously think about creating a national model car championship that would have as its focus a dispassionate approach to subject matter and an absolute commitment to subject-matter neutrality and objective judging. Titled the "First Invitational Model Automobile 'Battle of the Champions,' " I rough -drafted rules and classes and circulated that document to Tim Boyd and other interested modelers on July 18, 1978. After receiving their comments, I called Lee Lasky , then in charge of the car show company Promotions, Inc., to determine his level of interest and support; Lee was not particularly enthralled by a call from an upstart in Salt Lake City. As plans progressed, the name of the contest was changed to the First Invitational Model Car Championship, and was scheduled for April 11-13, 1980 in Omaha, Nebraska, nearly two years hence, to coincide with the Finale of the ISCA show series now that the MPC series was over. I believed it was time to move adult model car construction out from the shadows and into the bright light of public review and respect.

The first requirement of that new contest would be to avoid the MPC preference for certain kinds of models by openly welcoming builders of all scale automotive interests.  The contest would have to explicitly provide a hospitable forum for model car builders of all building persuasions so their efforts would be recognized, encouraged and championed. Focusing on those goals would encourage the development of ever-increasing levels of craftsmanship and create a guild-like association of friends who, through mutual respect for one another instead of hostility, could come to enjoy and learn from the work of others, and share techniques and ideas with each other. Moreover, the contest had to champion the notion of individual craftsmanship in all aspects of model building as a goal in itself — no style of building would be favored over any other. These plans were ongoing at about the time that the local club — the Utah Model Car Association — was planning to present its annual contest. However, that club contest was never held, and that pushed me to privately sponsor a contest in Salt Lake City.

During this time, Dennis Doty called and told me about a new national model car magazine, titled Scale Auto Enthusiast, soon to published by Gary Schmidt. My first call to Gary precipitated a working relationship and a friendship that lasts to this day. That early involvement with Gary and his fledgling magazine caused me, because of my already tight schedule, to cease writing for Special Effects Modeler and to focus my attention on his new publication, a decision made easier after Gary purchased SEM and terminated its publication. Of course, the fact that Gary purchased and "buried" SEM would have made it difficult for me to continue working for that publication!  At that point, neither Gary nor I had any hint of the profound effect each of us would have upon the efforts of the other over the next decade and a half. But I quickly realized one thing: I now had access to a significant audience through Scale Auto Enthusiast, and it would be the perfect way to publicize a contest. I was on my way! But there was still a serious obstacle — and distressing failure — to endure before the goal of a national contest would be realized.

 

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