Modern Lore LE: Hobbies
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Kirby barking at the train layout in the Buffalo Grove home. (The layout has since been dismantled. Our home was sold in 2018.)
I grew up in two houses, one until the age of 14 and the other until 18, and both of them had a basement largely overrun by my father’s Lionel train layout. The first one built in the Wheeling home was more impressive. It traveled around the room’s perimeter, tunneled through walls, snaked through a crawl space, sprouted out in the laundry room, detoured behind two pinball machines (my father built them when he worked for Bally, years before I was born), and eventually spiraled up a multi-level, grassy suburban town that sprawled across two large, custom-made wooden tables decorated in artificial turf and bustling with plastic stores.
My father met other model railroaders on online message forums, and sometimes when they were passing through Chicago, they’d take a detour to our basement to watch the trains run. The layout wasn’t quite elaborate enough to make it onto TV—a few times my father swore someone wanted to film it, maybe photograph it for a magazine—but it was in that upper echelon for hobbyists, good enough to impress online and win virtual fans.
I loved going to the hobby shop with my father and brother, a small independent Mom & Pop that sold Lionel train parts, fake gravel, and tiny people you could glue onto tiny benches outside of a tiny train depot.
At that age, I wanted to be a veterinarian for large farm animals (despite being a Midwesterner, I grew up far removed from farm life,) and I gravitated towards a model kit series of “visible” creatures. They were to-scale, anatomically correct horses or dogs molded into clear plastic so that you could see their organs and bones. Using a guide, my father and I would clip small pieces from the sprue, like a heart sliced in half, the two parts needing to be glued together with rubber cement. We’d paint each organ a different color to tell them apart, and I’d learn where the stomach or the spleen rested inside a horse’s belly. We’d carefully cradle the innards inside the skeleton and encase the structure in its transparent shell.
The original Visible Dog Assembly Kit, produced in 1961.
For some reason, the dog, a Boxer, was incredibly difficult. The organs never quite fit together, the bones were too fragile, and without dexterity and precision the pieces would fall apart. In frustration, it became known as “that damn visible dog.”
Even today, my dad works the damn visible dog into conversation. Maybe I struggled to replace a flat tire—I swear I know how to do it, but I don’t have the arm strength to loosen the lug nuts—but the challenge of real world mechanics was nothing compared to that damn visible dog.
circa 1996