Gallery

A recent afternoon at Aviation Books Plus and Showcase Hobbies in Rancho Palos Verdes.

“Well, for one thing, they’re safer,” Sandra Braun, a plus-size model and graphic designer, says of the tiny planes. Braun has come to the shop to buy an F-14 Tomcat for her 15-year-old son, Benjy, who is thinking of applying to the U.S. Air Force Academy, “although I’d rather he went to rabbinical school.”

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“We’ll get those little Hitlers,” says Richard Bartlett, 82, a retired Navy captain who flew Corsairs in the Pacific during World War II. He built his first model plane of wood and paper in 1929 and sells his models on consignment at the shop. Gesturing to the hundreds of menacing planes suspended from the ceiling, he adds, “This is a new home for my children.”

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“Boy, you touch that, you’re touching history,” says shop owner Jim Otis, holding the wheel from the Star of Italy, built in 1877 and later used by the Alaska Packers Assn. of San Francisco to transport gold miners during Alaska’s gold rush. “This thing saw many storms and a lot of ice .... Oh no, no, it’s not for sale. I love it too much.”

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Al Smith, research technician at Red Star Military Museum in Culver City, works on a P-38. Model making, he says, “builds the virtue of patience in dealing with my fellow men and, most important, with my fellow women.”