Let Me Tell You About My Uncle

The picture directly below is not a picture.  It's a vivid memory.

 

"Hoisting the gorilla" is NOT a metaphor.

Almost 50 years ago, my parents sent me to visit my Uncle Jim in Toronto.  I think I stayed with him and my aunt for about a month.  They were an older couple who had never had children.  My uncle was retired on medical grounds with terrible, debilitating arthritis that gnarled up his hands so badly that even a simple handshake was painful.  He had been a lineman with the hydro-electric company, so I suspect he had once been very talented with his hands.  

My Uncle Jim was the kind of adult who talked to children, not down to them.  He would ask about my political opinions and earnestly listen to whatever nonsense my seven year old brain believed about politics.  He never laughed, just nodded and asked more questions.  When he took me somewhere like a museum or a mall, wherever I wanted to go, whatever I wanted to see was fine by him.  As a kid, I was used to my parents busy lives, meaning if we went somewhere, I got dragged along.  What they needed to do always seemed more urgent than what I was interested in, so trips out with Uncle Jim were a joy. 

I wish I had realized how special he was at the time.  

Uncle Jim is one of the few people I'm related to that I can honestly say I have great respect for.  The reasons for that are many and personal, but for this story to mean anything, you need to understand he was my favourite uncle and for good reason.  He is someone I dearly wish was still around to talk to, laugh with and ask advice of.  Plus, he never once missed a chance to sneak a five or ten dollar bill into my hand when we would part ways after a visit.  In those days that meant comic books and candy for days!

Uncle Jim took me to my first baseball game and if you've been paying any attention at all around here, you know how much that means to me.  It was the first year that the Blue Jays existed and I've been a fan ever since.  That was back when they played at old Exhibition Stadium, on a diamond that had been cobbled together on the field used by the Toronto Argonauts, the city's football team.  I didn't see another live game until the 21st Century.  

That was one of many, many wonderful memories he gave me that summer.  My aunt was still working at the time, so it was pretty much the two of us for the whole time I visited.  Museums, subways (something we didn't have where I grew up), parks and most especially, the TOY STORE in the Eaton Centre.

Uncle Jim was one of those wonderful grown ups that didn't really know how to say "no" to a seven year old boy when he set his heart on something.  Looking back, I know that he and my aunt weren't wealthy, living in a small one or two bedroom apartment, probably just managing with his pension and her wages, but I'm pretty sure that every time we hit that toy store I came home with something and probably not something cheap.  I know my parents had money trouble during the recession in the late 70's and I'm pretty sure my aunt and uncle were in a similar boat, but to my recollection, that man denied me nothing.

Back to that picture above and the memories it evokes.  In my childhood, few figures loom larger than Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man.  I have more than a few recollections of running across the school yard, jumping off a wall, throwing a pretend punch or lifting something "heavy" while making the "da-na-na-na-na" sound that accompanied all of Steve Austin's "bionic" action sequences.  Between Batman and Steve Austin, I was convinced I'd grow up to be a superhero.

When I saw the Six Million Dollar Man models in the store, I was instantly captivated.  I needed them.  Even if I'd never, ever built a model.  I recall my uncle teasingly telling me that I wasn't old enough for them, since they're "8 and up" but I eventually "convinced" him.  Thank goodness they were snap-together! 

My uncle, bless him, bought me the one above.  And the paint.  And brushes.  I can only imagine what the model, half a dozen or more jars of Testor's model paints and some brushes set him back, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't in the budget.  

We brought it home and I set to putting it together.  I clearly recall getting stuck and being unable to get the gorilla's head to snap in as it was meant to.  Pretty sure there were tears.  Remember, Uncle Jim could hardly use his hands, so he could really only offer encouragement to me as I navigated building my first model, ever.  Eventually, I got it all put together and I think I painted it that night or maybe the next day.

I was hooked.

Over the course of visit, Uncle Jim bought me the entire set of four.  I distinctly recall running up against my first frustration with paint colours as I learned that orange didn't cover very well when applied by brush to plastic when I built this one:

 

To this day I dread any red, orange or yellow parts of a model build.

 

You know when you listen to an old person tell a story and there's a hitch in their voice when they recollect a particular part of the story?  In my internal monologue, I had that hitch when I was reminded of these models one night a couple of months ago.  I don't recall what triggered the memory, but it popped up and wouldn't pop down again.  And once again, there were tears, for entirely different reasons.

 

I was on a hunt and over the next month or so, I found all four of the models in the series:

 

 

"Wrestling the alligator" is also NOT a metaphor.

 

 

Okay, so "Bonking the Biker" might actually be a metaphor.

In my quest to complete the set, I also discovered that there was one more that I'd never seen:

 

 

And "Fixing her bionics" is DEFINITELY a metaphor.

The Bionic Woman only got one model in the same style, likely because the model company assumed that model building would be more a "boy" thing than a "girl" thing.  They probably would have sold more of these if they'd put her in an action pose like the four Steve Austin models, but it was the 70's and I suspect  model and toy companies hadn't really figured out how to handle female action stars yet.  In the time, I likely would have thought the same and left the Bionic Woman model on the shelf, regardless of the pose.  I was seven, so I've forgiven myself the schoolyard sexism.  I bought one of these before any of the other.

 

Times change.  Plus, it has a cool backdrop AND you get Oscar Goldman in the kit.  Not sure why the boss would be handling Jaime's bionics instead of Dr. Rudy Wells, the bionic technician, but there it is. 

 

I was very lucky to find all but one of these intact and in the original cellophane.  It wasn't cheap, but I did get pretty good deals on them, thanks to a little digging and haggling.  The only one that wasn't still sealed was the first one, with the gorilla and the tears.

 

The "Fight for Survival" (that's the one with the gorilla) kit is one that runs into the hundreds of dollars if you can find a new one, so I had to bite the bullet and buy one that had been previously assembled.  It was cheaper because someone had decided to glue the snap-together model.  Thanks to that, I got a good deal.  Fortunately, with a little gentle persuasion, (almost) everything pried apart easily thanks to old, brittle glue.  I did break the two posts that snap the gorilla's feet into his body, but I will be able to make an invisible mend there and thanks to the weird way they modelled the legs and feet, I would have had to putty that seam in any case.  It looks like he's a dude in a gorilla suit with shoes shaped like feet under his pants otherwise.

 

And Steve is missing his right hand for some reason.

 

 

This is gonna be fun!

I'm a lot more skilled and a lot more patient than I was back when I first built these with my Uncle Jim.  There's a removable panel on the arm and leg of each Steve Austion figure that you can pop off to expose the "bionic" part inside.  I plan to do a little modification so it appears that Steve has ripped his pants and jacket to expose his bionic parts.  

 

I plan to do these with putty and glue and then paint them and display them as a tribute to my uncle.  They might be snap-together models meant for the younger set, but they're pretty well detailed and with a little effort I think they'll end up amazing.  I'm at least certain that they'll be better than what I built back in 1977.

 

It is funny that these days I invest a lot of time building figure models yet I've never associated that passion with the models I built as a kid, since I built tons and tons of cars, boats and planes in my later childhood and into my teens but not one figure model.  I thought of it more as an extension of my miniature painting hobby but it turns out I was just going back to the beginning.  Go figure.

 

I am not certain, but I doubt that I brought the originals home.  Pretty tough to pack plastic models in a suitcase.  I'm reasonably sure that they got tossed sometime not long after I left.  I don't think they went with the decor. 

 

I can't blame my aunt and uncle for not hanging on to them, but I like to think that Uncle Jim was proud of my seven year old's ambition for doing the whole set and I'd love to be able to show him what I'll make them look like now.  I know he'd be fascinated with the process and I hope that my rediscovery of something he gave me in childhood would bring him something like the joy he gave me all those years ago.  

 

So what's the first step?  Gotta replace that hand.  It turns out that the gorilla's feet are almost identical in size to Steve Austin's hands.  So:

 

 

It's not perfect, but it's a great starting point.

 

A little epoxy putty mould gives me a place to start.  I plan to build the whole model and then cast the hand from more putty.  While it's still soft, I'll sculpt it a bit so it looks like the left hand above and then glue it in place.  It's on the underside of the gorilla and I plan to display these high up, so it'll need to be convincing.

 

I have trouble drawing or painting hands in two dimensions.  Sculpting one in 3D is a first for me (I did manage a "hand" on my Green Goblin miniature in my chess set, but it was more luck than skill) so this will be an adventure.

I hadn't even thought about these in many, many years.  I build a LOT of figure models, but somehow it never occurred to me to look into these.  Now that I have, I'm itching to get started.  I'm already having fun building them in my mind, so it's going to be a great few weeks while this progresses.

Thanks, Uncle Jim.  Again.