When I was Fourteen

When I was a kid I loved putting model cars together. Since I couldn't actually drive a car, I found some satisfaction in plastic models of the cars I'd love to have. For hours I would sit in my room assembling and painting the models, usually with a brand of glue and paint called Testors. I'm talking about the old days before adults figured out that kids could get high on model airplane glue. No, I'm not saying that I intentionally got high on the glue. But as I got further into each model building session the quality of work seemed to lessen. By the time I was gluing headlights or tires on, chances are alignment would be off and gobs of dried glue oozing from joined pieces would be the result. The Testors Paint covered some of the flaws. As you can see from the vintage advertisement above, Testors was well within a young man's budget. It came to about ten cents per bottle of paint.

I read somewhere that Testors black enamel worked well for certain Ford Model A touch ups. It seemed like a good fix for things like the peeling paint on my running boards, or chips in the black paint elsewhere. It worked well when I was a kid, so I went online and ordered a bottle from Amazon. I must have been high on glue when I ordered, because I didn't notice the size of the bottle. I assumed it was one ounce. The paint arrived on Saturday. It is not a one ounce bottle of paint. It is one quarter of an ounce, and it cost $3.14. That is $12.56 per ounce, or take that a bit further, $1,607.68 per gallon. A little bit less than the price of an ounce of gold.

Not quite as big as I remember