Carstens' '52

Aunt Teek's from RMC May 1952

1952 was a big year for Railroad Model Craftsman magazine. The May issue was volume 20, number 12, the end of the magazine's first 20 years. Well, ok, the magazine started life as The Model Craftsman and covered a wide range of model building subjects, not just model trains, but 20 years in business is an accomplishment, especially when those 20 years spanned a great depression and world war. 

The RMC team took the May '52 anniversary as the opportunity to begin introducing a series of changes to up its model railroading game. Among other features, '52 saw the introduction of Frank Ellison as a regular contributor with a big series on the fundamentals of model railroading, inclusion of a monthly blueprint supplement, Lloyd Giebner started his long run as RMC's de facto structures writer, and Harold H. Carstens, aka Hal Carstens, first appeared in the May issue's masthead as Associate Editor.

Mr. Carstens, who years later would buy the magazine and become its publisher, had written articles for RMC prior to joining the staff, so he wasn't an unknown quantity to readers. Of all the pieces he published in '52, two of his structure articles made me sit up and take notice: Aunt Teek's Furniture Factory, in that May '52 issue, and The Home of Shake's Beer in June '52. It wasn't so much the projects that caught my interest, but how they were written up: both included background stories in which I heard echoes - echoes from the future :-) - of E. L. Moore.

Here's the preamble to Aunt Teek's Furniture Factory:

Ephaim and Ezekial Teek didn't have an easy time of it when they first set up their wood working shop in the hinterlands of Paramsippus. Indeed, if it hadn't been for the kind words of their plumpish aunt, Obediah Teek, they may well have given up and gone westward. As it was, Aunt Teek was hard on her furniture and required new chairs so often that the two nephews were kept almost constantly busy. While this kind of business was fine for experience, it was hard on profits.

Nevertheless, their business grew as news spread that even Aunt Teek couldn't collapse their new rugged Teak Wood furniture and soon they had to look for larger quarters. They found them in the hastily vacated stone building of Colonel Bourbon Carstairs (no relation to the author although they might possible be from the Scotch side of his family). After the government revenue agents took the Colonel away the boys moved in. The Hudson River Traction Co. laid in a freight siding and the fame of their wares spread far and wide. In fact, their products became so well known that an extra win had to be added. It is this factory that we see in the photographs and which will be described in this article.

And if that weren't enough, The Home of Shake's Beer, a brewery project of course, includes an extra dose of bad puns and cornball wordplay:

There were tears of rejoicing as Colonel Bourbon Carstairs greeted his old buddy, Bacchus Shakes, whom he hadn't seen since they once sold Indian Kickapoo Joy Juice years before in the West. Old Bacchus had sent for the Colonel in hopes that the Colonel could do something to pep up business for Bacchus' Mineral Spring Water Co. Things were in a sad state indeed. Old Bacchus had done his best, floated bonds, watered stock; anything to try and boost sales and increase revenue but, alas, it seemed as if nobody cared to drink water anymore!

But the Colonel had an idea. The water here in Boiling Springs was excellent but why waste it just to drink. Make beer out of it and they'd both clean up! Quickly they formed plans for the new company. A partnership was formed called the "Great Pard Brewing Co." and their product was to be named in honor of old Bacchus, "Shake's Beer".

There's more, including a story about Bud the brewmaster having a barrel of beer fall on him that didn't cause injury because it was full of light beer, but you probably get the idea.

Including these sorts of tall tales in what today would be a serious and pragmatic article wasn't unknown back then, but given the extensive and good natured correspondence between E. L. Moore and Hal Carstens in the years to come it made me wonder if E. L. Moore imitated Carstens' style to get noticed, or maybe adopted that style because he liked it. Or maybe there was nothing premeditated because he and Carstens' were simpatico, and their writing styles were just examples of that - Carstens maybe just recognized a kindred spirit when he came across E. L. Moore. Of course, maybe this is all just a coincidence, and I'm reading things into commonalities of the past that just aren't there. Nevertheless, it's interesting.

Left: Shake's Beer RMC June '52; Right: GNBCC HQ by Seth

One last thing. It seemed like the techniques Carstens used to build his O-scale Shake's Beer produced a model that looked rather similar to the models Seth builds for his city of Dominion. While reading though RMCs from 1952 I was also reading Seth's The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, and his model of the Brotherhood's club HQ seemed similar, in style and technique, to Shake's Beer. Both are built from heavy cardboard; both are decorated with inked on wall blocks; both have doors and windows drawn on card or paper and pasted to the structure; both are more caricature than 'fine-scale' . They aren't identical of course, but Seth's Dominion buildings do have the vibe of how models of this sort were built in the '40s and '50s, as well representing buildings of that era and earlier. I'm not saying Seth knowingly used methods of the Carstens' era, only that the similarities are nevertheless interesting - although there are probably a limited number of ways to build structures from cardboard.