Trip back in time to the Hobby Shop

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That and the Army/Navy Surplus store.Cool stuff cheap ! A favorite place when I was a kid.
 
Thanks for posting this video.
It sure brings me back to a time when things were a lot simpler.
Modeling taught us patience and skill.
Sadly, many kids today will never get these lessons or learn these skills.....
 
I would peddle my bicycle to "Tony's Hobby Shop" 2 miles on collection day for my News paper route. Every week I would buy a model car kit. As I got older the cars got bigger. Now I have a disease of the hobby. I can't stop buying automotive items and I am out of room. LOL

I wish my grandsons could relive the days of my past. I instilled it into my son but my grandsons only know what we can teach them. They will never know how it really was . It makes me want to extend my life somehow.
 
Still in business in Orlando.

Kinda pricey, though even compared to other brick and mortar retailers.

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What a by gone era. "Young Men" magazine. That'd go over about like a lead balloon in today's climate.

...and that Reginald Denny's Hobby Shop. I bet that was the father or grandfather of Reginald Denny who was the trucker almost beaten to death in the LA riots after the Rodney King beating.
 
The CP&H building still has vintage pressure pad operated (narrow) automatic doors.

I think it used to be a Publix.
Those early Publix markets all had that same, art deco styling.


They are roughly:

20% cameras and frames
20% plastic models
20% model trains
20% R/C
Some rocketry and die cast, and telescopes.
 
We had Dean Phipps. A combo hardware/hobby/and auto in the Pittsburgh area.
I still remember the day my Dad bought a "New" 20'' Gas lawnmower.$30. Man I loved that store.They had it all.
 
We had "Woodcraft Hobby Store" in Minnesota. They had a 1/2 hour TV show on at 12:30 pm on Saturdays back in the 60s. I never missed that show; trains, planes, model cars and slot car racing!
 
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As a R/C enthusiast myself I tried to get my 38 year old son, when he was 5, to get into R/C cars but my attempt was futile. My grandson, now 15, was introduced to R/C nitro car and that also failed. When I attend club meetings I notice an absence of young people getting into anything but video games and their Ipad. Hobby shops are almost non existent and the Govt. has stepped in to regulate use because People are doing stupid things with Drones. The meetings I attend average age is about 60-65. Lionel trains has also been stone walled by the youth. Don't see any train setups at Christmas time in the Department stores.
 
Thanks for the memories!
Growing up in Montebello (SoCal) my local hobby shop was Victory Hobbies on Whittier Blvd., a 3-block walk from home. It was just a small shop with plastic models, glue and paints in the front and HO-scale trains and a small layout in the back.
My first plastic model builds were airplanes with kit prices at $0.98 each ($1.02 including sales tax). I can't tell you how many times I robbed that piggy bank to go buy a new kit to build.
I built that same model B-24 shown in the video.
I later got into 1/25 model cars and still get the urge every now and then to build something.
 
In Norwalk (SoCal) it was Toy Giant. They had everything including chemicals for my chemistry set and solid rocket motors for my next door neighbor’s rocket with parachute! Besides model cars, planes, ships, and army men, I remember buying rolls of caps for my Fanner 50. My next door neighbor would by bee-bees and CO2 cartridges for his BB guns. Oh, and kites!
 
We had Jim McKay's Macon Toy and Hobby. It started out in a hidden back room at the Joseph N. Neel clothing store in downtown Macon. You had to walk all the way to the back of the store, through really narrow rows of clothes until you got to a completely hidden doorway in the rear corner of the store. Then you walked into a store within a store. It was really cool. Jim finally outgrew that space though and opened the store in what was the Military surplus store on third street. They had everything, but their specialty was model railroads. That's where I got hooked. I used to ride my bike down to Central City Park on Sundays. The Middle Georgia Model Railroad club met down there to work on their N and HO layouts. Long gone now, of course.
 
........Or "radio" stores. My Gramps had a huge stash of old science/ mechanics magazines when we moved into the house, when I was 6. These went back into the 30's and clear up into the then present day, which was about 1954. I read the hell outta them. Each month was a "radio project" and occasionally they would show a depiction of the guy at the "radio store", stocked with shelves of vacuum tubes and other goodies.

When I got to Treasure Island, San Francisco, I found out "there really had been" that type of store. There was a big "military surplus" store in San Francisco, "downtown," as well as a radio /TV shop --either part of it or next door, don't remember. Yup---shelves of electronic parts, just like in an auto parts store
 
Went to school with a kid who's father owned the town hobby shop, Duke's hobby shop, here in podunkville (or was then) ga. It was a little hole-in-the-wall store but filled with all the treasure in the world for me. I often daydreamed about what it would be like to have a dad that owned a hobby shop, heck, i didn't even have a dad much less one that owned a treasure chest of models.
 
We had Hobby Shack in Orange County. Huge building did loads of mail order but had a showroom too. Heavy R/C, huge 5 foot wingspan models hanging up and 50 foot long aisles dedicated to plastic models: Cars and trucks down one and Military down the other. Revell, Monogram, AMT, Tamaya ($$$) and a few more that I cant think of. They had 1:2 plastic models of machine guns! M16, AK47, M14...M60! The whole side wall display was R/C gas motors and radios/servos. I used to ride my bike down the river trail about 2 miles to this place just to gaze at all the stuff I could not afford as a 14 year old. It changed its name to Hobby People and downsized radically, moving to a corner of the original building. Now its gone. Ebay/Amazon put them out of biz.
 
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