Dart got two things in the mail today; the first was a letter he’d written to Ira Cotton which had chased the USS Bordelon and the USS John R Craig all over the globe before finally landing back on Dart’s doorstep. The other was an application for the National Model Railroad Association. The latter leads Dart into a long and poetic discourse on the wonders of model railroading. I think I can paraphrase with a sampling of his comments.
“The men interested in model railroading tend to take a more serious and stable view of their avocation than do most hobbyists.”
“For the furtherance of their hobby, model railroaders have a fine little magazine which works along with the aforementioned NMRA and the national association of model railroad manufacturers. These groups have set up as good and complete a set of standards for parts as is possible.”
“These men…usually resent any reference from outsiders to ‘playing with trains,’ but among themselves, they speak freely of the same thing, kidding each other and themselves alike.”
He speaks of the many and varied subgroups within the whole and explains “My taste…runs to old-time stuff, usually between 1900 and 1920. I’m attracted to quaintness and simplicity.”
“As for my own railroad, … I chose two branches of real railroading for the basis of my building. The first was the outmoded and almost extinct ‘narrow gauge’, and the second was the …interurban electric line.”
“A hobby is a difficult thing to explain to an outsider, … mainly because the hobbyist cannot adequately explain to himself the thrill he gets from it.”
“I really hope you’ll pick up enough interest in my spare-time job so that we can have some fun in it together. Without you spending some time with me in the pursuit…, I would feel as if we weren’t always in complete accord. Yet I worship you to the extent of hardly wanting you to look at such things if you don’t like ’em.”
With those comments (and so many more), he finally winds down on the subject and turns to other things. He is glad to have talked with her the other evening, and he thinks he understands why she seems to be mad at the world after the weenie roast party. He too has experienced that feeling when people he had faith in behaved in a way that did not live up to his ideals. “To see our friends and those we live and work with do things we’ve thought of as immoral cuts us. … I love you so very much, Dot, I’d never be able to recover if either you or I slipped at this point.”
While the tone of the final part of this letter is a little “holier-than-thou,” it reveals a young man with high standards, who is so grateful to have found a woman who shares them.