JERRY CAMPBELL

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.