On Christmas Day, 1950, Kenny Bergman and I sat on his living room sofa smoking cigarettes. I was thirteen. Kenny’s mother was visible, working away in the kitchen. The house smelled of roasting turkey and the radio was on, Bing Crosby singing carols. On the other side of the room under the Christmas tree, a set of American Flyer electric trains moved slowly around a platform filled with little houses, cars and paper tunnels. Each time the train emerged from the nearest tunnel, Kenny or I would raise his Daisy Targeteer BB pistol and aim for one of the glass Christmas tree ornaments he’d placed in a gondola or on a flat car. Several times, a smiling Mrs. Bergman walked through the living room. She never said a word. I thought I was in heaven.
Today, Kenny Bergman would be called a nerd. He didn’t fit into any category. He wasn’t a goody-goody, nor did he hang out. He kept to himself, and what company he accepted he did so on his own arbitrary, unfathomable terms. Kenny was two years older than me and lived up near the end of the block on the other side of the street. His father, known as “Pat,” was Jewish and worked shifts at the Atlantic Refinery in South Philadelphia. The family was nominally Catholic, but Kenny and his younger sister Julie, both went to public school. His mother had a full time job, one of the few married women on our street of thirty or so row houses who went out to work.
Kenny was a tall, gangly kid who wore glasses with smeared, dirty lenses. While he could be off-putting and uncongenial, he was able to do things no one else could do. He could build models. He knew how things worked. More importantly, his mother seemed to sense that Kenny was different, and left him alone to develop in his own time and in his own way. For years, I had given Kenny a wide berth. When we moved to the street five years earlier, he had contemptuously rebuffed my casual overtures to friendship. With my feelings hurt, I decided that I didn’t like Kenny Bergman. But in that period between childhood and full-throttle adolescence, twelve, thirteen years old, I came to learn that Kenny Bergman’s indifference to me wasn’t about me. Kenny treated everybody the same. When he came down the street, or if his name came up, my mother would say, “that’s the most disagreeable kid I’ve ever seen.”
One spring afternoon after school, Bobby Yanks, Brian Daily and I were goofing around on Brian’s back lot. Kenny lived next door to Brian. Without a word to any of us, Kenny climbed the steps up to their lot. He was carrying a large, bright yellow model airplane, a flying model. The idea now of kids building flying models is as removed from contemporary culture as scrimshaw, the study of Latin, or the hand illumination of manuscripts. Flying models were made from blueprints and plans that required the assembly of three-dimensional aircraft skeletons using thin strips of balsa wood. The completed airframe would then be covered with fine tissue paper and painted with a clear “dope” that would dry and pull taunt to create a hard, but feather-light, skin for the aircraft. Flying models were powered by a long internal rubber band that hung loosely from the back of the propeller to the tail section of the plane. When the rubber band was wound tightly, but not so tightly as to crumple the balsa wood and tissue frame, the plane would be hand-launched in the hope that it would pick up a thermal current before the propeller lost power. A successful flight meant a chase, following the plane until it would glide back to earth, blocks or even miles from the launch point. Most flying models were inscribed with the name, address and telephone number of the builder so that it could be retrieved if lost. Kenny Bergman built flying models.
I was in awe. My own attempts at model building had been disasters. And I was trying to make the relatively simple solid models, not the complex, delicate work required to finish a flying model. My efforts always ended with misshapen chunks of balsa wood, bleeding fingers from Exacto-knife blunders, and spilled bottles of Testor’s Dope that filled the house with noxious odors. As Kenny Bergman placed his large flying model on the ground and began winding the propeller, I lost all of my caution and jumped the hedge separating his lot from Brian’s. I wanted a closer look.
I tried not to let my enthusiasm spill out by asking the obvious questions that were flooding my brain. “Did you build that? How high will it go? Are you going to fly it now?” Kenny Bergman might have looked up at me from his propeller winding or he may not have. Either way he would have dismissed my presence. I held myself in check and just watched.
Kenny’s notoriety had increased just a few months earlier. For his fifteenth birthday he had gotten the ultimate in boy toys, a Daisy Pump Gun. It was a BB gun reputed to be able to put a clean hole in the thick brown glass of quart-sized beer bottle, and do so from across the width of a city street. The Bergman house, on the other side of our street, backed up to the raised embankment of the Reading Railroad’s Trenton cut-off. It took the railroad police less than a week from Kenny’s birthday to calculate the exact window the shots were coming from. In exchange for Kenny’s mother surrendering the pump gun, no charges were filed.
I watched as Kenny began winding the propeller. The plane was a beauty. Its wingspan was at least three feet, and the wings themselves must have been seven inches wide. The late afternoon sunlight pierced the semi-opaque, coated tissue of the fuselage, lighting up the delicate structure of the interior. Before I could reveal my ignorance with a dumb question, Brian Daily had jumped the hedge and asked excitedly, “you gonna fly it? You gonna fly it now?” Kenny looked up with a sneer of condescension, mumbled something about “not with all the fucking trees and wires around here,” and went back to his winding. I thought to myself, “why’s he out here then. He could have wound that propeller inside.” I realized that the inscrutable Kenneth Bergman had wanted our attention. That’s why he carried the big amazing airplane outside. He wanted us to see it and to marvel at what he’d done. As causally as I could, I asked, “when you gonna fly it, Kenny.”
The following Saturday I was at Kenny’s front door just before noon. His mother shouted up the stairs, “Kenny, Pete from down the street is here for you.” “Tell him to come up,” was the reply. Kenny’s room was every kid’s dream come true. He had a bike, and he was allowed to keep it in his bedroom. He even had bunk beds, the top one piled high with empty model boxes, a half assembled HO gauge railroad layout, ice skates, and several months of dirty laundry. From the ceiling, strung at varying lengths was a maze of model airplanes that almost filled the upper half of the room. A half dozen fishing rods stood in one corner, and a lethal looking bow with a quiver full of feathered arrows hung from the wall along with a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun, still there even after L’Affaire Pump Gun. Along one entire wall ran a brightly-lit workbench that held a far better selection of hand tools than my father possessed. Kenny was seated on a stool hunched over the big yellow flying model doing something that involved a magnifying glass and a tiny screwdriver. A Pall Mall burned in the ashtray next to him. I sat down on the unmade bottom bunk bed, lit a cigarette and waited to see what would come next.
We followed the railroad tracks for about a half-mile to the baseball fields at “B” Street and Olney Avenue, Kenny carrying the airplane and me an army bag he had filled with tools, parts and three bottles of beer he had snitched from the refrigerator. I don’t think we exchanged a word the entire time. The playground was nearly empty as we squatted and Kenny began winding the propeller. Standing up, one hand restraining the prop, he threw the plane into the stillness of the afternoon. The freed propeller bit the air and the plane began to climb. In a wide upward arc it rose until the rubber band powering the prop went slack. There was no lucky thermal to lift the plane further, and while Kenny’s craftsmanship in the construction of the plane had been flawless, the same standards didn’t hold for his knowledge of aerodynamics. When the propeller stalled; the plane, instead of leveling off into a graceful spiraling glide back to earth, pitched over onto its nose and corkscrewed straight down. One of those meticulously crafted wings tore itself free, flipping the plane end over end until it met the ground with a splintering of small sticks of wood, and the tearing open of that beautifully taunt yellow skin that had covered the exterior of the airplane. Kenny’s impassivity was broken by a softly muttered “shit.”
After that afternoon’s crash, Kenny moved on to building more sturdy, solid bodied flying models powered by small alcohol-fired, glow-plug engines that were flown in screaming circles at the end of hand held cables. While Kenny’s personality never encouraged friendship or hanging out, I would stop by his house occasionally to see what was going on. He neither encouraged nor discouraged me. But by then, I knew it wasn’t about me.
The following summer, just after I had succumbed to the symbolic and vicarious attractions of the hot rod car culture, I returned to Kenny’s room with a model kit I had purchased up Fifth Street. The picture on the box showed a classic California Deuce Roadster, a channeled, fenderless 1932 Ford Model “B” with a chromed engine and exterior chromed exhaust pipes. In a fit of enthusiasm, and mindless of my previous failures at model building, I had gone ahead and bought the kit. Inside the box were the same unfinished blocks of balsa wood and the same undecipherable instructions that had made a hash of my earlier efforts. That might have been the end of it, but then I thought of Kenny. His reaction was “what do you want to build that kind of crap for. It doesn’t do anything.” But he sort of agreed to help me, at least he said I could use his tools and work on it up in his room. My ineptitude must have driven him to distraction. No matter what I began doing, he would be right over next to me, irritably showing how me how to do it the right way. I learned that balsa wood could, with patience, be transformed into looking like shiny metal. Numerous light coats of paint, and fine sanding between coats, then more of the same with sealers. Tiny engine parts could be crafted using an Exacto knife, precise measurements, a magnifying glass, and great care. Over a two-week period, a dozen packs of cigarettes, a lot of sodas and a few beers, my fantasy of a miniature candy-coated, cherry red street rod became a reality, a thing of pride and beauty. I carried my completed trophy home and installed it on my mother’s living room coffee table for all to see and admire. I astounded my friends and neighbors. A predictable reaction soon set in among those who knew me. The buzz on the street was “he didn’t build that. Kenny Bergman built it.” My protestations of “I did too” did nothing to make my case. Only later did I learn that on several occasions Kenny had informed my detractors that no, he hadn’t built it, that I had built it, that he had only shown me how. Kenny Bergman let me go out a champion. I’ve never built another model since.
A postscript on Kenny is that he went on to become a builder of architectural models, and that the quality of his work had earned him a national reputation. But unfortunately, Kenny hadn’t been able to grow his business to the next level. It seems he had a problem keeping good help.
Tags: 1945-1955, 1950, bing crosby, christmas, daisy pump gun, daisy red ryder carbine, daisy targeteer, flying models, glow-plug engines, memoir, olney, pall malls, philadelphia, reading railroad, testor's dope
