HOBBIES

By Bob Gray

September 2016

I guess I have always had a hobby of one sort or another.  The picture below was taken when I was about 11 years old.  It is my bedroom when we lived at 420 West Seventh Street, Erie, Pennsylvania.  We moved from this house in the summer before I started junior high at Gridley.  As you can see from the photo, I had a collection of models that included:

·       World War I bi-planes hanging from the ceiling (my favorite),

·       Air and space craft, such as the ill-fated Vanguard rocket and early space station,

·       The United Nations Building,

·       Medieval knights in armor,

·       Cars,

·       Sailing ship,

·       Dinosaur skeletons, and

·       Military vehicles (tanks, trucks, cannons).

 

On the work bench next to me is a balsa wood airplane with gas powered engine that was one of my major modeling disappointments as I could never get the engine to run long enough to actually fly it.  It met its end about the time we moved out of the house when I put an M80 firecracker in it and through it out my bedroom window.  Given the volume of models present in my room, I must have doing models for several years at that time.

Me at work on one of my early hobbies, c 1958.

My other hobbies from this period included building, pushing and driving a soap box racer (I won’t refer to it as a derby racer as we never entered the official contest) and archery.  My friends, Bummy Dudenheffer and John Kelly, and I built the racer from a set of wheels that my mother must have obtained at a house sale and old crates from the nearby A&P Grocery store.  Our favorite destination was the hill at the foot of Myrtle or Sassafras streets which ended at the fish hatchery after going over some railroad tracks.  This activity usually ended with a broken racer and subsequent repairs.  The Bayfront Parkway now resides where the railroad tracks used to be, so now it isn’t possible to do what we did back in the 1950s.

Hobbies I have had later in life, in addition to my genealogy and family history endeavors, include:

• Magic – I never did much reading for school when I was young but when I was about 12 years old I was so fascinated by magic tricks that I checked out and read every magic book in the Erie Public Library.  Harry Houdini was a favorite.  There was a novelty shop on State Street, I think near 10^th Street.  I used to ride my bike there to shop for magic tricks I could afford.  The shop owner was a very large man who never said much, but he kept a plastic throw-up on the counter next to the register.  It was probably the third or fourth visit before I realized it wasn’t real.  Most of the tricks I bought were not very good.  The best ones were a set of red balls and a marked stripper deck of cards.  I did have one card trick that completely fooled my father.  It started with a special sorting of the cards that made them appear random to the audience.  After cutting the cards, the person would be told to take the top card. 
• Bridge and other card games – My father was always playing cards when I was young.  His favorite most likely was Bridge Cribbage had to be a close second.  If we had more than two people but not four Bridge players, then we usually played Pitch which is Bridge like.  When I first met my wife, Mary-Alice, she decided to take Bridge lessons.  At one point, we were playing Bridge every Friday night at the local pool we belonged to.  We still play, only not as often.
• Ham radio – I was K3YNA when I was in High School and College.  I was never very good but my friends were.  Actually, I was much better at building ham equipment that using it.  I built a receiver from a Hallicrafters kit, a 100 watt transmitter, and a variable frequency oscillator.  These were all tube electronics as transistors were just coming into use.  I was secretary of the local amateur radio club for a couple of years.  Probably the most fun was spending a night in the field contacting as many other hams as possible.  One of the other benefits was that the late-night engineer for the local radio station, WJET, was a ham so we used to go sit with him and take call-in requests.
• Tennis – I started playing in college when my friend, Rafael Castro, got me interested.  I wasn’t very good but I had fun and continued playing after college for a couple of years.  There were public tennis courts across the street from my apartment in Alexandria and I used to play on Saturday and Sunday mornings with my roommate, Tom Noon or co-worker Jim Loftus.
• Sailing – A longtime favorite.
• Travel – A last in, first out coverage of my travel over the years
• Motocycles: My brother Bill had a 1948 Harley-Davidson that I would fix and ride in the mid-1960s. The bike had a 74 cubic inch (1200 cubic centemeter) engine, a much sought after springer fork front end, a foot clutch, and a tank shift. I have not been on a bike since then but I still enjoy seeing them. Click on the link for a video of a small part of the 2018 Memorial Day Patriot Ride from the Harley shop in Fairfax to the Pentagon.
• Hobbies to be included in future updates of this page
• Cars
• House projects
• Blues
• Theater

Indications are that I have passed on the hobby gene as the picture of my grandson below demonstrates his interest in building models which is where I started.

My grandson hard at work building a Lego model, July 2017.

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