PORT HADLOCK — Ask Les Walden where he was in the 1950s, and he doesn’t have to think long.
“Right here, probably eating a hamburger,” Walden said.
Walden was sitting at a table in the Chimacum Cafe, where he was having dinner with other members of the North Olympic Peninsula Modelers Society. The group eats there twice a month before the meetings in Port Hadlock.
But after the May 21 meeting, they returned to the cafe to put up a display of their work, a preview of the club’s annual contest and show on June 20.
The theme of this year’s show: the 1950s, a decade that many of the members experienced firsthand. Their main interest, then as now: airplanes, ships and tanks from World War II on, plus cars and trucks like the ones they once owned.
“History is a part of the hobby,” Larry Speelman said. “I never do an airplane just to do an airplane. I always do it for a reason, for friends or neighbors who have a plane they flew and only have a photo.”
Speelman, who lives in Sequim, was in the Air Force and builds model airplanes. He has two Vietnam-era fighter jets on display.
He and the other modelers usually start with a kit, then customize it to resemble a specific vehicle.
Specialties
They also specialize.
Mark Ford of Port Angeles builds models of German tanks that take first place at national model shows.
Roger Torgeson of Sequim specializes in ship models and will display his prize-winning model of the USS Virginia, which sank in the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but was raised to fight in World War II.
Torgeson also has started a working model of the first Navy aircraft carrier, the USS Langley, complete with a working elevator that raises a tiny plane to the flight deck.
Torgeson should know ships. He joined the Navy after graduating from Portage (Mich.) High School in 1962 and training at Great Lakes (Ill.) Naval Training Center before shipping out on the carrier USS Constellation.
His ship was in Vietnam in 1964 during the Gulf of Tonkin battle, but he didn’t see combat.
“I was in the engine room,” he said.
Build vehicles
For many of the members, an interest in building vehicles started with model kits and graduated to working on the real thing when they were old enough to drive.
Torgeson’s first car was a ’51 Chevy that his father bought for $25.
“My father and I rebuilt the engine,” he said. “It was an ugly green color.”
Walden, a Port Townsend native, had a ’47 pink, four-door Plymouth when he was in high school and was president of the Rakers Car Club.
Charlie Aldrich, who grew up in Castro Valley, Calif., doesn’t like to talk about his first car.
“I only had it three days,” Aldrich said of the ’39 Ford V-8. “I took out the neighbor’s retaining wall.
“My father made me sell it.”
Aldrich has just finished a 1952 F-1 Ford pickup, which he painted yellow and customized to resemble a Union Pacific company vehicle.
Bud Clarke of Port Ludlow also continues his interest in automobiles by working with die-cast cars, trucks and hot rods.
Eclectic group
But not all the model club members grew up the ’50s. The youngest member, Thomas Beren, is an eighth-grade student at Chimacum Middle School.
Nor are they all male.
Patti Walden, Les’ spouse, specializes in figures and has three in the display.
Stephanie Yarwood is building a World War II diorama of a Russian tank with a woman commander, not unusual in the Russian military, which had women pilots and snipers, Patti Walden said.
Yarwood’s diorama will be among the 300-plus models expected at the NOPMS’s fourth annual model show and contest on Saturday, June 20, in Building 204 at Fort Worden State Park.
Walden, who now lives in Port Ludlow, has three submarines and a Red Baron airplane on display at the Chimacum Cafe, where he once drove his pink Plymouth to buy a burger and fries.
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Port Townsend/Jefferson County reporter-columnist Jennifer Jackson can be reached at jjackson@olypen.com.
