JERRY CAMPBELL: THE MAN WHO CREATED TODAY'S HOBBY
By: Tom Cleaver
I date my decision to "get serious" about the hobby of plastic model
building to the day in 1972 when I walked into the new Squadron Shop over in
Concord, California. A long drive across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco,
and a horrid location (they had the good sense to move to San Mateo about
six months later), but for me it was "the door into Summer."
There in the glass cases were row after row of
built-up models by two guys I'd never heard of before - Mike Dario and Dave
Boksanski - and those models were a revelation: "So
that's
what a good model looks like!" I went home, looked at mine, and wanted to
trash them (I did turn most of them into my first "parts box"). The process
of Learning New Things about the hobby has never gone away. And within the
year, I was friends with both those guys, and involved with Golden Gate IPMS
after meeting some of the members in that shop.
Also there in the store were decals that didn't come from the kit,
books, strange things called vacuform kits, kits from places I didn't know
kits were made in. A whole new world opened up.
Squadron Shop, Squadron Mail Order and Squadron Online were the
inventions of Jerry Campbell, Squadron's founder and first CEO. In each
incarnation, the operation came to define what the commercial side of the
hobby should be, leading everyone else into the new ways of marketing that
we now think of as The Way It's Done. Any LHS in existence today is a
variation on that theme, and every other mail order marketer in business has
followed Squadron's example, some better some worse than the original.
Since the notice came on July 3 about Jerry passing on, there have
been a wealth of memories shared at many places. As one person said, "The
stories you can tell about that guy!" Jerry had a legendary short fuse, and
I've never heard of anyone who ever worked for him leaving other than by
firing (several of us more than once). He was also extremely generous. He
created a job for me when I mentioned in a phone call that I was going
through some rough seas. I know quite a few others who can tell similar
tales.
Jerry supported the hobby in a myriad of other ways. He was famous
for supporting a "garage manufacturer" when he found something they did he
liked (and then working them to death on it - but hey, it was an income).
He introduced most of us to Eastern European vacuforms when there was still
a Cold War on, and later his orders for kits with the new limited-run
manufacturers in the Czech Republic gave financial stability to MPM and
Eduard in their early days, just to name two well-known examples. There was
never an aftermarket decal creator who could have stayed in business without
Jerry's purchases of his products.
If there was ever a Giant in this hobby, that giant's name was Jerry
Campbell.
Model on, you old curmudgeon!