Tulsa Modeler s Show and Forum Like a lot of retirees, my wife and I enjoy taking road trips to places we ve never been, so when a good friend in Tulsa invited us up to their annual show we decided to attend both as a vendor and a contestant. I had only been into Oklahoma once, to attend the IPMS USA National Convention 20 years ago, so getting a chance to see another part of the state was a draw to both of us. We decided to make the 9 hour drive on Thursday, straight through, then spend Friday visiting some museums and at least one hobby shop that is heralded to be one of the best in the state. We left Katy at 8:30 a.m. and had a pretty much an uneventful trip to Tulsa arriving at our hotel about 5:30 p.m. If you go north on I-45 anytime soon, be aware that there is about 50 miles of heavy road construction between Streetman and Corsicana which has the lanes very narrow and you have to drive up against a concrete barrier for most of the 50 miles. If this isn t enough, everyone still wants to drive 70 mph! For two people in their late 60 s, a nine hour drive will wipe you out and we seem to remain tired the entire trip. Man, when we needed Richard Kern (ex-emt), he decides to go to the New Orleans show! We awoke on Thursday morning to 40 deg temps, but a bright sunny day. After breakfast at the hotel, we made the 30 minute drive across the city to the Tulsa Air & Space Museum (located adjacent to the Tulsa International Airport. It is not a large museum, mainly one building and a single hangar which houses a F-14 Tomcat in the center. The hangar has an upper level that contains a large library of aviation books, study area, and four R/C airplane simulators that Becky and I spent almost an hour playing with. This experience convinces me that I made the right decision building models as a hobby and not flying radio controlled airplanes! The museum has several airplanes hanging from the rafters, plus a Bell HTL-7 (USN variant of the Bell 47K) painted in dayglo orange paint. Also, due to being raised in Oklahoma, there are several exhibits and a large canvas painting of Wiley Post s Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae. There is also a very nicely done Lindberg model of this aircraft on display. Wiley Post is buried in Oklahoma City and the state has named several schools and airports after him in remembrance of his contributions to aviation in the 1920 s and 1930 s. The cost to tour the museum is $8.00, or $7.00 for
those of us over 62 years old. It takes about an hour to view everything in the museum (unless you get hooked on the flight simulators like we did). Below are some photos I took inside the museum; Bell HTL-7 Large canvas painting of Winnie Mae F-14 Tomcat, center of collection Just part of their large book collection. Spartan NP-1 Bi-Plane, USN Trainer My wife (Rebecca) becoming a pilot!
After a bite of lunch, we headed farther north to Owasso, OK. to visit Top Shelf Models, a large and well stocked store. This shop reminds me of King s Hobbies in Austin, complete with a large selection of paints, magazines, books, and kits, but all at full retail prices. Despite this fact, I wasn t going to drive all of the way there without buying something, so I settled on 3 bottles of Model Master paint and a Kittyhawk 1/48 th scale UH-1Y Venom helicopter kit. It could have been worse, because they had a Merit 1/200 th U.S.S. Hornet for only $400! Top Shelf has been in business for many years and the local modelers claim it s the best hobby shop in Oklahoma (if you can overcome the sticker shock of his prices). But, like King s in Austin, it s the only way a LHS can stay open these days. Top Shelf also has an e-bay store that helps supplement their income in order to stay open. The rest of Day 2 of our trip was spent visiting historical sites and another museum on the history of Tulsa and the surrounding area, something I won t bore you with. That evening we had dinner with my good friend Jerry Greer and his wife. After 38 years working for Goodyear, Jerry retired about 10 years ago and spends his free time modeling and attending a lot of shows. He regularly attends shows in Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio, and for the first time, I ve talked him into attending our show in Houston. We were up early on Day 3 to make the drive to the Bixby, OK. Community Center where the Tusla Modelers Forum guys were hosting their show. After checking out of the hotel and repacking the car, we made the 6 to 7 mile drive to the community center where the guys were busy setting up and the vendors were moving in. No help here, you were on your own. After finding our two vendor tables, Rebecca and I brought in my boxes of books, Piotr s kits he ask me to sell for him, and the decals and aftermarket stuff I wanted to try and dispose of. The entire show was held in one room with the vendors outlining the room along the walls. The final count of vendors was nine, with ourselves and Jeff Guenerra (also from Katy who was there selling books and figures) being the two who came the farthest. Of the other seven vendors in attendance, there were some really good bargins to be had. I bought a Hasegawa
1/32 nd F-5N that came with a Blackbox resin cockpit set and new AMS Resin nose for only $40, a kit and accessories I had been looking for for a while. I also bought a couple of fairly rare and desirable aircraft kits for $10 each to flip on e-bay when I get the time. Once we had our table laided out, I registered the six models I brought but then could not find my categories, mainly because there weren t any! Because they use a points system (similar to what we do at our bi-annual club contest), all of the aircraft and helicopters models just get lumped together wherever there is space on the tables. I did not have a good feeling at this point. Since sales were so slow, about 11:30 a.m. I asked their show coordinator if they were going to have a judges meeting and needed any help with judging. He said did not have these type of meetings and they already had their four judges (to judge 150 models in 1-1/2 hrs!). They use a point system where EVERY model is examined and given points in Creativity, Workmanship, and Finish. This meant that the judges would have to carefully examine every model and give it points. They also only used one person to judge all of the aircraft, another person did the armor, another person did the ships, and a 4 th person did figures, sci-fi, misc, etc. Without a team, bias and personal preference enter into the judging big time making the whole process unfair to those entries the judge did not care for. I have been to a lot of contests in the past 20 years and I have seen a lot of different judging methods used, but this was the worst system I have ever seen. There were well over 75 aircraft models that a single judge had to look at and award points to. I am sure the first 10 to 15 models he judged were
done well, but as the day wore on, can you imagine how fairly the points were awarded to those done last? I watched this guy from my vendor table and saw that he barely glanced at the last 20+ aircraft models he judged. Armor was almost non-existant, only covering 6 of a single 8 table in total. However, there were so many ships that they filled five 8 tables alone. Cars, figures, sci-fi were also all light in comparison to what I had seen at other recent shows. Sales were so slow that Jeff Guenerra and his son packed-up at 12:30 p.m. and left. They did not make enough money to afford a hotel room, so they headed south to make the nine hour drive back to Katy that afternoon and evening. As a vendor selling books, I learned a long time ago not to expect great sales at a model show, but this one was even slower than normal. I was able to sell one of Pitor s King Tiger kits, so that was a good sale for him due to the size and cost of the model. A lot of people came by our table just looking and kicking the tires, but no one really bought much. I was able to sell a few books, a few decal sheets, and a few resin aftermarket sets but that s about it, enough to pay my expenses for the two tables and contest registration. The awards presentation was suppose to start at 2:30 p.m., but did not get started until 3:30 p.m. Besides the four judges, the club only had one person tabulating the results on a lap top who did not appear to be very computer literate because it took him forever. Like us, a lot of people wanted to leave and get on the road, so it was frustrating to wait for this one person to do his thing. The first, second, and third
place awards were given to those who had scored the most points in their respective categories. This club did not have any out of the box catergories, all 1/48 th and 1/32 nd props and jets were lumped together, no scratchbuilt, conversion, or vacuform categories, etc. It was one of the weirdest list of categories you will ever encounter. I entered six models and won three second place medals (made out of hard plastic) and I suppose I was lucky to get those. My friend Jerry told me they had over $7,000 in their club treasury, but spent less than $500 on awards for the show. The whole thing wrapped up at 4:00 p.m. and Rebecca and I were in the car heading out of Tulsa by 4:15 p.m. for the 4 hour drive to Plano, TX. where we spent the night. I came away from the show disappointed in sales, disappointed that I did not win better awards, and generally feeling this show was very poorly organized and judged. Would I go back, hell NO! Tulsa is a really nice town, but not nice enough for me to ever want to visit it again. I guess the highlight of the trip was getting to spend time with our friends, which afterall, this is why the hobby so great, the people in it.
One last item. We stayed at a LaQuinta Inn in Plano, nice room, but the shower head was broken, there was almost no water pressure in the sink, and at best, we only had luke warm water. When I checked out the following morning, I complained to the manager who ended up giving us a FREE room! So, it does pay off to raise abit of hell every once in a while. Rick Cotton would have been proud! Boyd Waechter Secretary