My best friend in the summer of 1965-66, was Frank Terlecki Jr. He was and continues to be, a great friend and a creative guy! Together we entertained our friends, our parents, and mostly ourselves by engaging in the hobbies of an adolescent summer. We wrote the critically acclaimed scrap-story book, The Blob. It was a storybook in pictures about our perception of the end of the world. Then there was the Deedoot Monster story, and the creation of several great cartoon characters, impromptu skits borne from watching too many episodes of Morgus Presents http://www.morgus.com. Finally, there was the great fishing expedition of 1965, where we caught several dozen brim that were so small they couldn't stay on the original hooks we started with, so we went down to the bait shop and bought hooks small enough to catch them. We didn't really want to keep them, we just got sick and tired of them eating all of our bait.   

But perhaps our greatest accomplishment came at the culmination of a summer career of building 1/24 scale model cars. Frank and I built model cars all summer. We bought and artistically created some of the prettiest little cars ever. Often we would build them and melt or damage them as if they had been in an accident, then repair them and build them over again. Sometimes in failure, we would simply blow them up with firecrackers in a dramatic demise. 

By the middle of that summer, we had already built so many cars that we had boxes of spare parts from each kit and could practically build an entire car from scratch parts. My 1932 Ford Victoria was one of those cars that had been built, blown up and in the shop to be rebuilt.  We had a literal junk yard of model cars! See the thumbnails at the bottom of this page...

Frank had two younger brothers, Greg and George who like many younger brothers, enjoyed imitating us and like most older brothers, Frank was sarcastically tolerant of them. He would do great impersonations of them playing with his prize models, pushing them into the dirt and bending the chassis until the wheels broke off and so on.

The Super Duper Flyin Joey and Brian Mobile was built while Frank and I stayed in character, pretending to be his younger brothers with new names...Joey and Brian. We reconstructed the Victoria as if we were an 8 and 9 year old loose with a tube of glue, and no intention of using the enclosed instructions. With snotty noses, and mock runt voice dialects we proceeded to build this car with masking tape, Barbie doll heads, cardboard wings, glue, and more glue. the glass treatment got a half tube of glue alone.

We were laughing so hard during the construction, Frank's mom warned us that we would wake the baby up and be expelled from the house for the day. At long last it was done! What a piece of work!

Our ruse would be complete when we at last took the finished masterpiece down to Newman's Hardware store on Harper Avenue in Saint Clair Shores Michigan to enter it in the annual model car contest where we bought many of our models.

In years past we felt slighted that we never won showed or placed with any of our best efforts due to the fact that the contest was often dominated by older more experienced modelers. We felt that the categories for winners should have been bracketed better, but then we weren't buying shovels and plumbing supplies along with our model cars.

Nevertheless, the rules were that if you bought a model from Newman's, you were entitled to an entry blank form to enter any car you built!

The look on Mr. Newman's face when he reluctantly placed our Super Duper Flyin' Joey and Brian Mobile deep in the rear of the showroom window where the contest entries were displayed, told us that we had won a small victory in the politics of that day. It was obscure but it was still a victory!

Gregmone-