How It All Began

DaQueen: I do remember how all that started and where the first seeds of the board lie....I had just stepped into the job as CS Manager and it was mostly JL related work. But there was this grumpy old man ;-) around the corner from my office who did nothing all day but sniff glue and put these couple of weird models together and take them apart, over and over and over...and he was getting paid for this! So, I asked around (there were only a handful of us working there at the time) and learned that this was Polar Lights, the newest product line for PM.

Well, since I knew squat about models but had to be able to communicate with y'all, I went over and started talking to Dave (Metzner) about this idea I had; What if I built a model and asked the guys that visited our website to teach me how to do this. It was a way to open up the communication line and show our interest in them. Would Dave help? He agreed and we were off and running. At the time, PL only had a few kits on the market. The BB was in it's infancy, having just rolled out of AOL as a server. There were maybe 2 posts a day and mostly the kind you'd find in any customer service dept...nothing like what we grew into...a real community / family. Back then, our site was so insignificant, that Tom Lowe was cruising and posting on AOL collector boards for feedback.

I also remember the deciding factor that led us to call Hank (Hagquist) for help in setting up our own system. One morning, back in the days of dial up, AOL kicked me off for the umpteenth time. It was the last straw! I called AOL to see what the deal was and they wouldn't give me any assistance because I wasn't Tom Lowe, owner of the account. They would only assist if Tom called them. Thinking back, I should have just grabbed Dave and had him pretend to be Tom...but, alas...Tom was in China. When he returned, I asked him if we could call my buddy Hank, a webmaster, and see what he would suggest because this AOL thing just wasn't going to cut it.

Hobby Talk

 Early version of the Hobbytalk home page

Phrankenstign: Was the web site that had the spider web wallpaper on AOL? I remember seeing pics of the early kits like The Bride of Phrankenstign that later ended up in the dealer catalog.

I also remember a period when we had to watch the Playing Mantis mascot intro page animation every time we hit the site. It was a bit of a drag in the dialup days to have to wait for it to load, so I was glad when it was eliminated. Didn't a few board members help debug the site at one time?

DaQueen: The spider motif was the first one Hank did for us and it was very cutting edge for it's day, Phrank. And by the way...thanks for all you have contributed to this community over the years! You've always been a wonderful member of the family.

Arronax: Perhaps this might be a good time to thank Hankster for putting up with us over the years.