The Little World

Look at the yellow price tag on the Revell baggie kit.

50¢. A very important number when you were 13 years old as it was the amount of your weekly allowance. A salary-by-another-name paid by your parents in exchange for making your own bed and doing the dishes. As a valid salary there were no strings attached to it once it was in your hands. You could go out and buy 10 small candy bars or 5 large ones, two comic books, or a baggie.*

The baggie was purchased at the drug store and contained a drug – Styrene. It was shaped into a 1:72 airplane. The most common supplier was Airfix, but it appears that Revell also got into the act. Hooking young boys into a lifetime of cement on their fingers. There should have been a law  – promoting it…

I was brought back to the wonderful age of 13 by this gift from my friend Paul. It’s a New Zealand re-mould of a Revell kit from the UK. A 1962 original and may be different than the Airfix baggie  – which I think came out in 1963. But you never can tell who exchanged moulds in those days…and Revell was particularly quick to do remoulds. They still are…

Anyway, this will not be the first Zero I have in the Air World museum – but it will be a perfect compliment to the captured birds of the Rafwaffe and the USAAF Messerschmitt. It will be painted up as the Akutan Zero – the first intact one that the USAAF got in the Aleutians. The went on to a number of re-finishes as the Navy tested it out and used it for publicity.

I’m willing to bet they had to find small test pilots for it…

*  Don’t scoff. 1959 was a good time, if you ignored the fact that we had Krushchev to deal with.