Every once in a while, the light hits the old control tower just right. I needed a snapshot for an interpretive guideline, and right at sunset adds a glow. The ops building is currently getting the old lead-based paint stripped off. They use big sheets of sticky plastic to peel it off.
We always give departing journos a "page." (Vicki Viotti photo)
The folks here at work gave me a nice send-off, complete with the obligatory fake newspaper page. I’ll post pictures of the crazed celebrations as I left, but in the meantime, here’s the text of the going-away “story”:
After 33 years as a distinguished model airplane builder who also worked part time as a journalist, Burl Burlingame will leave the Honolulu Star-Advertiser to become executive director of the International Plastic Modelers Society, which will now move its global headquarters from Enchanted Lake to Ford Island.
Burlingame, whose fascination with plastic cement dates back to his time as a Radford High School student, will also produce the society’s newsletter, which he founded in 1985 in his spare time as a Today section page designer. After typically spending 15 to 20 minutes designing the front page of the feature section, which in those days was done on paper, Burlingame would then begin writing detailed stories about how to build miniature replicas of the battleship USS Arizona and critical reviews of different brands of model paint.
His favorite color is said to be olive plaid.Sometimes, Burlingame even wrote movie reviews, and once counted every word that Arnold Schwarzenegger said in “The Terminator.”
“After that he ended every day by saying, ‘I’ll be back,’ and by golly, he kept coming back,” said one former Today editor who asked not to be identified lest everyone figure out that she was the small Asian woman who often yelled at him to put a cap on the glue tube. Every day.
Burlingame maintained a love-hate relationship with computers. When he used Tal-Star computers, which crashed on a regular basis, he was able to merge his anger with his love of glue. One day, after losing the text and codes of his front page for a third time, he yanked the keyboard free, poured rubber cement on it and lit it on fire in the middle of the newsroom. On deadline.
“Burl had this glazed look in his eyes, like those kids who sniffed too much glue in intermediate school,” said a reporter who witnessed the fire. “He walked right up to me and lit up that keyboard. Then he walked out the front door, Executive Editor John Simonds frantically chasing after him. Burl went to the roof and tossed the keyboard from the third floor to a dumpster below.”
Burlingame outlasted seven Today section editors, management mandates to wear shoes to work and a newsroom campaign to end every headline with “eh?”
Top 10 Moments in Burl history!
10. Being the second most famous person who attended Radford High School.
9. Realizing at the University of Missouri that he wanted to be: a) a photojournalist; b) a writer; c) an international man of mystery; d) all of the above.
8. Finding out he didn’t want to cover crime after going out with a grizzled veteran who put wood blocks on his “murder shoes” to keep the blood off his footwear and slacks.
7. Playing in a band called Potato Cannon and recording an album that included the sleeper hit “Betty Rubble.”
6. In the 1980s Today section, helping turn the dry “Coming Up” Sunday column into a quirky must-read.
5. Building precision scale models at work. (Expect more of this!)
4. Writing books and publishing under his name and the pseudonym Rick Blaine. (Extra points if you can name the movie that spawned the faux author name.)
3. Having Katie as a daughter!
2. Having Amelia as a daughter!
1. Mary Poole marrying him and putting up with him for all these years. (And she’s still smiling!)
Yes, there are terrible factual errors! The flaming computer keyboard incident happened after five crashes and story losses whilst trying to get out a story on a looming deadline. The reason I got so angry was that the computer tech who was jiggling wires in the backshop was wholly responsible for the crashes, and when I complained, he said, “So? You’re just paid to type. What does it matter if the story disappears?”
I got so angry when it happened again — six times! — that I lit the keyboard and stomped through the newsroom waving it at editors. The only thing that I recall clearly was writer Murray Engle muttering, “Some day, that’ll happen to all of us!” And the damn keyboard went down spiraling off the rooftop like a flaming kamikaze.
The next day, I tried to apologize to Managing Editor Bill Cox, but he kept giggling.
THE ORIGINAL
THE COVER
Here’s a snapshot of a new lobby card for an upcoming comedy film. I actually said “Ouch!” out loud when I saw it. I can’t imagine the kind of damage control going on at the distribution company right now.
I’ve wanted to build an example of the famous “China Demonstrator” Hawk 75M flown by Claire Chennault for some time, and when Special Hobby released a 1/32 kit that included the parts, I was thrilled. But alas, Special Hobby had packed the wrong engine and cowl parts in the box, and it took six months of whining emails before they sent the right parts.
It’s a typical Special Hobby kit. Nice detail, massive fit problems. I’m actually building three different 75Ms, but what I’m concerned with here is the Chinese bird. In order to lighten the airframe for the Wright engine, Curtiss scrapped the landing-gear mechanisms and introduced fixed gear. The Chinese version, moreover, didn’t have the rear Plexiglas quarter-panels for the canopy. Instead, it had a graceful and rather subtle recess cut-out that was open to the elements.
They also apparently had trouble getting paint to stick. This will be a challenge to duplicate later.
Anyway, the only way to tackle the problem is brutally. The first thing is to figure out how to make equally sized and positioned recesses. I did this by chopping up a 1/48 P-51 drop tank and gluing the halves into place to dry over night:
Then, using a cutting wheel, the drop tank inserts were ground down to a bit higher than the fuselage surface:
Then, the interior of the rear quarter-panel was scratched up and scribed to roughen the area, while the fuselage around it is protected with masking tape. This gives the filler some tooth to grab on to:
And then a slurry of Apoxie Sculpt filler is kneaded together and pressed into the space. This will take a day or two to set up completely. I’m hoping that it will be flexible enough to withstand the rigors of construction:
When the epoxy putty has hardened, carefully whittle away at it with a sharp Xacto, then file and wet-sand it until the edges of the tape appear. That’s your signal to stop:
Then carefully peel the tape away. You’ll have the original depression filled and roughly shaped, but final sanding, buffing and polishing will have to wait until the fuselage is glued together. There’s just too much that can potentially go wrong from this point on!
Burl Burlingame
It’s in the cards
Written by Burl on May 9th, 2012Posted in Comment | 4 Responses »