Laurence Gieringer’s unacknowledged articles?

MB Mar/Apr '38; He could have been me had I been born earlier

I was wandering through some back issues of Lionel’s The Model Builder magazine, and in the January / February 1938 issue I came across this statement in an article called Contest Winners, which obviously was an announcement of who won a recent model building contest sponsored by the magazine:

Second prize was awarded to Laurence T. Gieringer of 340 North Ninth street, Reading, Pennsylvania. Pictures of the second prize winning railroad, and of the business street for which the award was made, are shown on another page in this issue.

Where was that page? I think they are actually referring to two articles in that issue. The first is 35-Year Old Model City, which has an interview with Mr. Gieringer, discusses his railroad (which was later to be known as the famous Roadside America), and presents many pictures of his work. In my earlier post about Mr. Gieringer and Roadside America I listed this article as being written by him, but it may have been written by a magazine staffer as no author is listed in either the table of contents or article.

The second article, which I think is the page referred to in the phrase, the business street for which the award was made, is Building A Model City. Again, no author byline is attached, and to make matters more mysterious, there’s no mention of Mr. Gieringer in the story. Although, the article is the beginning of a series about modelling buildings along a business street, and the models and techniques look like Mr. Gieringer’s. And then there’s the similarity in titles between the two articles. And then there’s the materials: they’re in the folk tradition, and consistent with Mr. Gieringer’s approach:

The materials, with the exception of a sheet of Masonite, are to be picked up around the house or office. They are cardboard of various thicknesses, a cigar box or two, sides and end of an apple box, common iron wire, a 1” plant [sic] [JDL: I think they meant ‘plank’] of white pine, cypress or other soft wood, some scraps of cellophane, tracing paper and few green bottters [sic] [JDL: from the article’s text it looks like they meant ‘blotters’].

I’m going to speculate that that article, as well as the others in the series, was either written by Mr. Gieringer, or ghost written about his work by a staffer at the magazine. The article states what’s in the series:

Buildings to be pictured and described in this series will include 

 a corner drug store; 

 stone cathedral; 

 bank and office building; 

 apartment hotel;

 movie theatre with roof tanks and air conditioning apparatus; 

 hat store with upper floors given over to a ladies’ ready-to-wear shop and an artist’s loft studio; 

 a building housing a double store with modern, recessed show windows and a gas station.

Building A Model City covers the corner drug store project. Here’s where the others were published - well, at least the ones that I can verify so far:

1938

Jan / Feb: Building a Model City (describes how to build a corner drug store)

Mar / Apr: Model Stone Church

May / Jun: Bank Building for the Model City

Jul / Aug: Miniature Apartment Hotel

Oct:       Constructing a Model Theatre

I haven’t yet found either the hat store (although I see a picture of it in the Constructing a Model Theatre article) or the double store with gas station, but this table of contents entry, Three Stores Under One Roof, in the Nov / Dec 1938 issue looks promising. The problem is the article itself appears to be missing from the archive - the archive’s maintainers inform me that the pages are missing because they were damaged or missing from the original they scanned. 

I’ll update the list when I find out more; however, I think it’s clear that we’re seeing a number of classic Laurence Gieringer projects that possibly haven’t been identified as such. And what if they weren’t by him? They’re still a fascinating look into model construction techniques circa the late 1930s built before the introduction of widely available specialized model making materials.