Hobbies That Shaped Me: A Journey Through Passion and Time

This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge, hosted by Long and Short Reviews. Check out other bloggers at this week’s post.

This week’s prompt was “Favorite hobby and why.”

I’ve had a number of hobbies over the years. My big three probably group into models, motorcycles, and genealogy. There are tons of things I’d like to spend more time doing, like photography or flying radio-controlled models. But these are the hobbies I’ve most enjoyed over the years.

Models

I got into models in the 70s when I was ten or eleven. My brother probably started it. I remember he built several, from a 747 to one of the Apollo-Soyuz spacecraft. I think I got my first one soon after that, an RB-66 bomber. I’m pretty sure that was my first one, anyway. I built a lot more over the years: a set of the three German pocket battleships, the Enterprise as refitted in Star Trek: The Motion Picture; the Galileo shuttlecraft; a set of Star Trek landing party equipment—are you seeing a pattern here?

Along the way, I also built a P-51 Mustang, one of the straight-deck Essex-class carriers, an SBD-3 Dauntless, a UH-1 Huey, a B-17, and probably a few others.

I had a lot of fun putting them together, but I rarely detailed them much. I probably put the most effort toward the Mustang and the Huey, weathering the gun ports on the Mustang and doing pretty extensive cockpit work on the Huey. Several times I asked my parents for a small air gun to do more and better paint work, but it never happened for one reason or another. They kept buying me models though.

I had a nice work table in the basement, although looking back, I wonder about how the fumes from the model cement might have affected me.

I wish I’d had something like YouTube back when I was into this hobby. There are so many modelers on there now doing amazing diorama work. I’ve been known to spend hours watching these artists in their work. It almost feels wrong to call what they do a hobby. Some of these guys are true artists.

None of the models survived to the present day. I think the carrier got shot up with a BB gun in the backyard. One of the planes got burned up in the yard. Most of the others disappeared during the various moves.

I’ve thought about getting back into it, but I don’t have a good place to build or display them. I miss it though, so I suppose that’s why I get on a YT jag.

Motorcycles

Are motorcycles a hobby?

I’ve written several times about how much I love to ride. I think it goes back in part to that snowmobile ride. I rode my first bike not long after I graduated high school, tooling around the parking lot of a local restaurant on a coworker’s 500 CC Honda. My mom was always adamantly against me riding, and I had suspicions about why but don’t know that I ever confirmed them.

When I got out of the Army, my initial plan was to go to Embry-Riddle School of Aeronautics in Florida, which was something of a hike from Ohio. I had it in my head that I’d buy a motorcycle and ride it down, or convey it down in some fashion. But I fully intended on the bike being my primary transportation down there. Neither of my parents thought much of the idea, and in the end, I didn’t attend the school. I’d already bought the bike though, a Honda CB650, and I held on to it for several years.

A lot of people don’t understand the call of motorcycles. Some don’t care about how they get to a destination, and never will. That was the crux of riding for me and for most riders. How I got there was just as important as where I was going. When I bought my last bike, the ride home wasn’t just about bringing it home. It was about three whole days on a bike, just me and the road.

Awesomeness.

I’ll almost certainly never ride on two wheels again. I didn’t feel safe anymore so I sold the bike. But the Can-Am Spyder and other reverse trikes sure do tempt me.  

Genealogy

So now we get to the main hobby I’ve got going these days.

I love digging up family history.

I’ve talked more than once about my genealogy research. I love doing the research and learning about the people who came before me.

I started genealogical research not long after my dad died, building on the stuff he’d already accomplished the “old-fashioned way,” pre-internet, using letters and phone calls and microfiche. I’ve found some information he was never able to locate. I’ve got lots of names and dates, which is really cool. For example, my maternal grandmother was one of 13 kids born over twenty-five years in deep rural West Virginia. My paternal great-grandfather had six children over nine years.

You know what I don’t have? The stories. Genealogy is so much more than the names and dates and places.

It’s about the why.

It’s about the stories behind those dates and places.

I know my maternal grandmother was the oldest surviving child of 13 kids. But I don’t know how she met Ed Baldinger, who was originally from New Orleans, or why they got married in New Jersey. I don’t know much of anything about Grandpa Baldinger, really, because he died before my parents even met.

I don’t know why she left her family and never spoke to them again. None of her siblings ever seemed to know either.

I don’t know exactly why my great-grandfather Johann Carl Müller left southern Germany on a ship bound for the United States, or how he met my great-grandmother in western New York. I’ve got no idea why they moved from New York to Texas, either. He was a farmer in New York, but by the time he got to Austin, he ran a feed store.

Why did they leave New York? My great-grandmother had family there. JC had family in the region, too.

Neither one of them had family in Texas.

Answering questions like that thrills me to no end. I remember the day I found JC Mueller’s immigration and naturalization paperwork. It eluded my dad for decades. When I found it, I just sat staring at it for the longest time, wishing Dad could have been there to see it.

It’s all about the story.

And the best part for me is digging up the story to share it with others.

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