IPMS/Long Island Scale Model Society

In a galaxy and a time, far, far away. Actually, it was only during the last century, and on the Long Island suburbs of New York City. Because this is an extraordinary anniversary, a little history needs to be said, though we understand and expect that the selection of the Chapter of the Year will be based on what we’ve done for you lately: what L.I.S.M.S. has done during 2006-2007.

One Tuesday night in 1972 in the meeting room of the Lindenhurst, N.Y. library, Jack Kennedy stood in line behind me, waiting to join the Long Island Scale Model Society. I had known about, and joined I.P.M.S. at its inception, as a 16 year old six years earlier. During the ensuing six years, I had dropped out of college, joined the Army and volunteered for Vietnam to fly as a Huey doorgunner. I returned home, finished college, got a real job (as opposed to the surreal ones I had before), got married and heard that a few other L.I. members of the society had just started a L.I. chapter.

Jack and I became friends and competed in the club’s contests. We became officers, starting at the bottom and working our ways up until we each had multiple turns as President of L.I.S.M.S. There were terms where I was Jack’s V.P. and others where he was my V.P. It happened that we thought like mindedly, and where other officers were content going to shows hosted by other chapters, Jack and I strived to get our chapter to take on the responsibility as well. We sponsored three Noreastcons, the Region I convention, and in 1981, the I.P.M.S.-U.S.A. National Convention in New York City. I was the Convention Chairman. The show was successful enough in that we were able to send some money to help out the Salt Lake City chapter which ran in the red the year before. The show also showed I.P.M.S. that we had grown too large to run the Nationals the way we had been, as there was some friction between our local chapter and the I.P.M.S. President. Rather than rehash that, the result was the formation of the National Contest Committee and a formal delineation of the host chapter – and I.P.M.S.' responsibilities. And as they say, the rest was history.

Jack and I established many procedures and set the bar fairly high that other subsequent administrations failed to meet, or beat. For example, we had a couple of bus trips to the Rhinebeck Aerodrome, home of Cole Palen’s superb restorations and copies of World War One aircraft. We arranged an overnight trip to the Silver Hill facility of the National Air and Space Museum.

The Long Island Scale Model Society has set up displays with many local libraries, L.I. hobbyshops and the Cradle of Aviation Air Museum in Garden City when it was still trying to get off the ground in fifty year old, beat up hangers. Notices of our meetings were posted everywhere and a concerted effort was made for publicity in the local media.

Club support for a major model show waned when it was found that the local hotels were booked year round with expensive weddings and business affairs, and no deals were to be had for a model convention. Room rates were prohibitive so we focused on running an annual show which started in the Hofstra University, then moved to the Polytech University in Farmingdale, N.Y. In the years when Jack and I ran the show, we built a win/win relationship with the local Air National Guard unit and they would fly in a Huey to park on the ‘green’ in front of the building housing the show. We also had a rapor with a U.S.M.C. Reserve unit who gladly parked a few of their vehicles on the green and those troops, along with the Huey crew, interacted with our show visitors. Our show had 500+ models and over 700 participants and visitors then. Until it all went bust and in the crapper!

The club was having tremendous success in spite of the fact that another set of officers fought Jack and myself tooth and nail. When the ‘opposition’ was in power, they refused to call the A.N.G. or the Reserves claiming that "nobody came to see that stuff, they came to see models." They refused to hear that many people built models of Hueys and Humvees, and liked to see what the real thing looked like.

It took a bit of coordinating and planning to have a trip to Rhinebeck, Washington D.C. or even the Intrepid in N.Y.C., so other administrations refused to make the effort and the club stopped going on trips. It took less effort to set up club displays, but it still took some effort. When the effort was no longer made, there were no more club displays.

The Cradle of Aviation Museum did finally get off the ground but instead of arranging for the club to build model projects for them, a club officer who was a full time museum volunteer, volunteered to do almost everything himself. Though the club was there helping the fledgling museum during tough times, it was not given the opportunity to participate when things came together.

At around the same time the club was asked to take out displays that Jack and I had coordinated with club members in the U.S.S. Intrepid Museum. No sooner were all the models out of there than had another I.P.M.S. chapter set up new displays throughout the Intrepid with models from their chapter only. The L.I.S.M.S. administration was ‘aced’ out of the museum and either made no effort, or too feeble an effort, to get that other chapter to share some of the displays.

In the year 2000, Jack and I became non-voting Trustees members of the chapters Executive Board. We could advise the other officers but otherwise held no power. The ‘new’ president’s first decree was that he didn’t want the Trustees to attend club officers’ meetings, and if or when they wanted our advice they would call us. The other officers were intimidated enough to approve that action. The result was that Jack and I were "out of the loop" re the running of L.I.S.M.S. from 2000 on.

The "good news" for I.P.M.S. was that Jack was able to devote more time and effort at the National level, eventually becoming President. I was freed up to do more and more I.P.M.S. kit reviews.

The "bad news" for L.I.S.M.S. was that that and subsequent administrations made no effort to promote the club or the annual show, and both suffered the consequences. Typical club meetings were "doomsday monologues" about how the hobby was dying, and therefore so were clubs and their shows. The fact was that other clubs and other shows were thriving, growing bigger every year! But when club members came to a meeting only to hear how terrible things were, they eventually stopped coming to meetings! When less people knew about the shows the vendors started to drop out, and when visitors saw less vendors, fewer people attended the shows until there was a spiraling down into the self fulfilling prophesy.

Where our annual show had continuously sold out its vendor tables, selling 45 to 55 tables before 2000, table sales dropped virtually in half since then. Model entries dropped from 500 to less than 300. Attendance dropped just as significantly. Last year, before I stepped back into office, our show, without notice, cancelled the Judge’s Free Lunch, a decade’s old tradition. Where our club meetings used to provide free coffee and donuts, they had begun to charge for them. Attendance plummeted.

1. Last March the officers of L.I.S.M.S. announced in our newsletter they were not running for reelection. This wasn’t the first time they were stepping down en masse. I had moved further away from the meeting place, so that I now had an hour trip each way. I spoke to a couple of members behind the scenes, to get them to run – without any luck. One fellow in turn, asked Bill Koppos, a long time member of the Suffolk Club but only a very new member of L.S.M.S. I realized that Bill would need at least a year as a V.P. or an apprentice, before he could become president. His only experience was with a club that was totally different than ours. Their credo was that they would never again run a model show, and that their meetings were seat of your pants, minimal planning, easy does it. It would be a whole new direction for L.I.S.M.S. or more realistically, it would be the final end of it altogether.

With no further success getting someone else to run, I convinced Bill not to start at the top so instead he started as my Recording Secretary. I got a long standing member, Henning Seidel to run as V.P. with the intention of moving up in a year or so. Fred Seitz stepped in as Corresponding Secretary and Bernie Vogelman, my treasurer in the past, came out of retirement to serve again. By putting together a slate to take over the reigns that had been thrown down, with officers who intended to stay on and move up in the future, we ran unopposed but significantly I believe we saved L.I.S.M.S. from dissolution – set up in place some qualified and likely successors – and saved RepLIcon from closing its doors as well.

2a. Upon taking office I learned that N.J.-I.P.M.S. had taken the first Saturday in April as their show date. For years their show was two weeks earlier, and our show was the first Saturday in April! They were not budging and there was not going to be any discussions. It was a done deal and L.I.S.M.S. could kiss off! But L.I.S.M.S. was on the verge of shutting down. It couldn’t afford a major change that would confuse attendees who were already confusing it with the other "Freeport Show," run by the L.I. Figure Club in the fall. In fact, the other L.I. plastic model show, for the L.I.A.R.S., a car modeling group, also had its show in the exact same Freeport venue in the fall. It would be impossible to have all the L.I. model shows grouped in the fall, even if the venue could accommodate us.

My new Board and I had to immediately scramble to make arrangements suitable for our show that would give it a chance to not only survive, but thrive. If not it might very well be our last show, which would have been a loss to I.P.M.S. We fought hard for the Saturday before NJ’s Mosquitocon. Two weeks before and we would be on the same date as a major L.I. Sci-Fi show that dominates the media and would have killed us. Three weeks before and we would have been head to head with NNL East, the biggest Car Model show on the East Coast – and that would have squashed us. Plus moving our date into March increased our risk of facing a snow storm and the ruining of the show. It took a lot of convincing to get the venue to give us the date – one week before NJ’s – our only viable choice.

The old marketing sage advice was, when dealt lemons, make lemonade. We had to make the most of our new date, to turn it to our advantage. We also had to overcome all the negatives of our previous shows. Even the fact that the last show didn’t provide the judges with a lunch, and the way it was handled, was a major obstacle. From the beginning, our flyer specified in bold type that lunch would be served to the judges, that we had a special award for a "Moving" Theme acknowledging that we moved our show date, and that as one of the first shows of its kind of the year in the northeast, modelers would flock to our show suffering from cabin fever with money burning a hole in their pockets!

2b. And by the way, the previous year our Armor Chief Judge had been talking it up that we were going to judge the Armor and related categories in an "open system" and award Gold, Silver, Bronze medals. We didn’t last year, nor did the Show Chairman tell him! Once burned, twice shy they say. We had to convince Armor modelers that THIS time we were awarding medals for Gold, Silver, and Bronze! We stated it right from the beginning, and went out and ordered the medals.

This was no mean feat either. In a short time a design had to be created and approved, a source for making the medals who could deliver the quality at the right price had to be found. Since my Chief Armor judge, Steve Andreano and I were two of the original founders of AMPS, we had the AMPS medals as a guide. My V.P.’s daughter is a graphic arts student and has helped us out in the past. She came through for us again.

We stated we would have AMPS-Like judging for those categories but not AMPS judging. I helped write AMPS’ original rules and one thing I realize is that for it to work for I.P.M.S. shows, you want to keep it simple. So I had to reinvent that wheel in quick-time, and to keep it very simple, the judging will be done the same way that I.P.M.S. judges except models will be awarded Gold, Silver and Bronze and there can be multiple winners. Like I.P.M.S. a modeler though, can win only one award per category. I spoke at length with Art Gerber, I.P.M.S. Armor Head Judge, who suggested that again, the awards and process be ‘skewed’ so that it was as much like I.P.M.S. as possible.

2c. It happens that this is our 35^th Anniversary as an I.P.M.S. chapter, making us one of the oldest ones still around. That has given me the added incentive to make sure we are still around! I had thought of just starting a new chapter further east out by me and cut my commute in half. But I thought of all the time and effort, blood (Xacto cuts), sweat and tears (when the model didn’t quite come out how you hoped) and decided to give it my best shot.

To instill some club member pride, the 35^th Anniversary Theme is an Award too. Luckily, the A-10 first flew, the F-14 was first assigned to active duty (both planes were born here) – there were plenty of Long Island related 35^th Anniversaries to tie in to so long as we hit the books and did some research.

2d. As mentioned earlier, L.I.S.M.S. had no relationship whatsoever with either of the two Air Museums on Long Island. The older museum has been here for three decades! I realized that mentioning the museums on our show flyer might open their doors to us, while attracting more visitors to the show with hopes of visiting either museum while they were ‘in the neighborhood.’ Rather than approach the museums with what we want, I approached them with what we could do for them.

The American Air Power Museum in Farmingdale features flying, restored and replica aircraft. During major holidays they need all the volunteer help they can get so we coordinated providing them with club member volunteers. In return they have given us prominent display space for the club members’ models and literature, including Join I.P.M.S. brochures. We have been increasing our club membership, since. They have also allowed us to hold our monthly officers’ meetings there and this past Christmas/Hanukah, we held our end of year Christmas/Hanukah party there jointly with the Suffolk Scale Model Club. Please note that the S.S.M.C. used to be an I.P.M.S. chapter but isn’t any more. By reaching out to them, some of their members have ‘crossed over’ and joined our club and others have joined I.P.M.S. Reaching out and bettering inter-club relations can only be a win/win/win scenario for both clubs AND I.P.M.S.!

By the way: In the past our party was at a pizza parlor that was wearing thin. The previous year the pizza ran out before the appetites did, among numerous complaints by club members including an open letter of complaint in the club newsletter! This party had 6 foot heroes and wraps (not 6’ wraps!) and all the trimmings, we even had a successful grab bag. More family members attended than ever before. There were plenty of smiles and leftovers to go around. Great cheer – a great way to close the year!!

2e. We have since contacted the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, a World Class Air Museum that had been closed to us for decades. They are providing us with a guest speaker at RepLIcon, the first time we’ve had a guest speaker at our annual show, ever! In fact it’s very rare for any show smaller than a Regional to have a guest speaker! We are providing both museums a display table each, at our show. The ‘Cradle,’ as it’s known, indicated they want us to help them with a model show at the museum in August, and they want to start a new relationship with us altogether, with us ironing out the details after our show is over. We will have perpetual display cases sponsored by the chapter and our literature is already there promoting I.P.M.S., our club and our show. They even hinted at our having our annual party there as well.

3. Last year we began having speakers speak at our monthly club meetings. We haven’t had any since 1999! Bob Cuce, a Vietnam vet, was a gun truck, quad 50 gunner and was our first ‘outside’ speaker. He’ll be speaking at our RepLIcon show also.

Retired USAF Captain James Brundige spoke in February. He flew F-102s in the Air National Guard, with President Bush!

Our Christmas party was our best ever! I even managed to get into a 30 year old T-shirt!!

4. Rather than ‘the hobby is dead, doom and gloom’ monologues at our monthly meetings, L.I.S.M.S. has been positive and upbeat. In fact, we run out of time half the time, with so many interesting things going on. We have featured different club members talking about their model building techniques. Ronnie LaMorte has won best in show awards and is one of many awesome modelers in our chapter. He freely shared his ‘secrets’ with us…

Seamus Boughe showed us how to buy sheet plastic cheaper than you’d find it in the hobby shops!

Every month members bring models in for ‘Show and Tell’

and tell us what they’re up to, or show off, or ask for advice.

5. Four times a year we have our ‘Quarterly Contests’ but to keep the competition on a level playing field, we separate our best builders (Advanced) from the average builders (Intermediate) and our Juniors. Although we started this twenty years ago, it too went by the wayside after 1999.

Some of Steve Andreano’s models have been in Fine Scale Modeler & Military Modelling Magazine!

6. We’re supposed to keep records of our club contest winners so that every other November all of the past two years winners compete for plaques instead of ribbons, in our World Series Contest. In November 2006 we had our World Series even though it took major detective work to figure out who had what models to enter. Now, we ARE keeping our records up to date.

This event is also supposed to separate our Advanced from our Intermediate, from our Junior modelers. This was the first time since 1998 that this was so!

7. L.I.S.M.S. sent four packages of models and sundry items to Iraq during the last eight months. The first half went to Major Ron Flood, a doctor at the V.A. hospital in Northport, N.Y. in his normal life.

Upon Ron’s return, a club member, Sergeant Richie Marrotta, was deployed and we began sending them to him. It turned out that one of the fellas in his unit built motorcycle models back home, so realizing that Region I’s ‘Doc’ Wiseman headed the motorcycle S.I.G., I contacted Doc, who promised to send that trooper a motorcycle model. I wish we could have seen that guy’s face when he opened the box and found a quality bike model in there!! Talk about ‘priceless!’

Richie has just returned and meantime we discovered that our Corresponding Secretary, Freddie Seitz’s son, is being deployed in a couple of months. During this time between deployments, we decided to take advantage of RepLIcon and take a collection for our veterans right here in our V.A. Hospital in Northport.

8. One thing our club did keep up with was having a monthly kit raffle. Initially it was to help raise money for our Treasury but when I took over and looked at what records I could find, it turned out that a lot of effort was expended to make a grand profit of $30 for the year. The biggest problem was that ‘somebody’ had to schlep a huge bag full of kits to every meeting, and replenish the stock regularly, and have a place to store them all at home. My second meeting as President, the fellow who had been doing it left the bag at my feet and said, I’m not doing it any more! I couldn’t blame him for not wanting the job any more but that wasn’t the way to handle it, or hand it off!

I explained the situation and asked for a volunteer. There were none! I got smart. We had a super raffle, got rid of most the rest and donated the balance to Iraq. From then on we’ve been raffling off Gift Certificates from our local hobby shops. Again, a win/win/win scenario. We get to spread the goodness around, shopping at different hobbyshops on L.I. The shop feels like we’re supporting them. The sharper retailer realizes that the modeler will spend more money than the face value of the Gift Certificate. The modeler feels like the prize has even greater value as he can buy whatever he wants, even though he may have to contribute some money out of his pocket. And I only have to schlep Gift Certificates, not kits, around!

9. When I took over, our webpage had become stagnant, not having changed much: since 1999! Today, it is something we can be proud of. Take a look http://longislandscalemodel.tripod.com/ !! Even the show has a few pages, from photos of last year’s show to having this year’s model registration forms online and downloadable to make registration a breeze.

10. Part of the ‘doom and gloom’ mantra was the club’s dire poverty. Yet no solutions were offered, short of shutting down RepLIcon. When I looked over what was supposed to be our finances, it seemed to me that we still had the same basic bank balance as we did: in 1999! Regardless, we created a membership list (the first one I had seen since 1999) and learned that almost everyone had an email address. We polled the members and they all agreed to try doing the monthly newsletter electronically. We’ve been doing it that way since, and mailing a hardcopy to each of the handful who aren’t, ‘computer literate.’ The club is now saving over $900/year printing and mailing the newsletter, plus the editor no longer has the labor involved.

11. While the club flubbed around, I can only imagine we stopped sponsoring trophy packages like we used to. One thing I started twenty years ago and other administrations dropped, while mine and Jack’s promoted it, was to swap trophy sponsorships with other chapters that sponsored an annual one day show like ours. Instead of chapter swapping checks, we simply did it on paper.

My shows printed a handout for the show, listing all of our supporters. When visitors saw a healthy list of supporters, they had to be impressed. And when they saw several I.P.M.S. chapters that had to be great P.R. for I.P.M.S.

I tried to get this going again and have had mixed results. A couple of chapters insist on swapping checks. Not the end of the world, if they come through. N.J. I.P.M.S. has its show the week after our show and insists on swapping checks. I informed them that if that’s what they want, fine. But since our show is a week before theirs, we should receive theirs a week before they receive ours. As I write I wonder if they will do this or renege on us. We are going to announce our supporters, and list them on handouts and online. I hope our two chapters can get on the right footing here and now. If we were able to do it with ‘The Cradle after a few decades…

Actually, I think I’ll give it a rest!

I hope you realize that I had to first establish what dire straights L.I.S.M.S. was in, crying poverty and threatening to shut down our annual show. With nobody wishing to run for office once again, the club itself was close to dissolution.

My executive board and I had enormous obstacles to overcome. We still have a way to go and there a few things overlooked here.

I hope you’ll give us all due consideration and choose the Long Island Scale Model Society to be the best choice to be Chapter of the Year for our Region, and we feel confident, nationally as well.