Toshi, I also went to College Pharmacy to buy kits - they were one of the few stores that didn’t charge sales tax. It was so cool that their window display was always jam packed with nothing but model kits, like a kid’s dream come true! But the owner always warily eyed me when I came in. Maybe he thought I was just some punk kid who was looking for spray paint or model glue to “huff”. Ah the 1970s. As a kid I thought huffing was stupid, since model glue had better uses, and spray paint was too expensive to waste! Yeah they were something like $1.19, which was about half the cost of my average kit purchase.
I remember lots of models from my childhood memories, since I never really grew up!
I loved monster kits, and was thrilled that the Aurora Godzilla had glow in the dark parts. I think I eventually painted out most of them except the eyes and the dorsal plates. Yeah, glow in the dark... It brings back those hippie drug culture days with the velvet black light posters, lava lamps, and the whole psychedelic thing. Man, I thought teenagers and college kids were so dumb!
Revell’s 1/72 B-17 Memphis Belle was the kit that cemented (pun intended!) my lifelong obsession with plastic kits. I had stopped building models by 4th grade, but my interest was rekindled when my best friend bought one. It was so cool that everything moved, so we rode our bikes to the neighborhood pharmacy (Thrifty’s in Kaimuki) that weekend and I bought one for myself.
I think out of all the model kits I built as a kid, the one standout was Monogram’s SBD Dauntless. It built easily, looked great, AND had all kinds of working features, like the linked dive brakes and the dropping bomb! And the movie “Midway” surely helped market the kit.
I craved any model catalog, and saved all the ones that came with kits. Me and my friends would spend hours poring over them and picking the ones we wanted to get next. I had the 1974 Revell catalog, and hung onto it until it was tatters. The 1977 Tamiya catalog fared much better, but it too was worn to oblivion. Those featured Francois Verlinden dioramas were fantastic!
Speaking of dioramas, the Shep Paine diorama sheets that came with certain Monogram kits were to die for! They were certainly instrumental in inspiring me to move beyond the OOTB experience.
Looking back to the 1970s, it is striking how we got so much enjoyment from so little, when you compare to what is available today.