scopemaster wrote:Hi MK1 a question,
Did you ever play at the Last Grenadier Burbank store (the original one next to the L&L Beer Bar Friday/Saturday brawl on the buitiful Burbank Mall) in the 1974-1979 period, I was a friday night armor game regular there.
Alas, no.
Call it a missed opportunity, on my part. But I knew nothing of the existence of that store until coming upon the one in Tarzana (or was it Reseda? It was on Reseda Blvd, at least) in about 1982/83, and then hearing there that there was another.
I did a lot of gaming in the 1974-79 period, with the original WRG rules. But it was all in private homes. None of us (Jr. High and later High School students) knew that such things existed as hobby shops with gaming tables, or gaming cons.
We had one place we knew of to buy GHQ models: Valley Plaza Hobbies, near the May Co and JC Penney stores at the edge of North Hollywood. It was a small shop, no room for gaming. Later, my father found a UK vendor (he travelled to Europe 6 times a year, and had some staff in London), and with his help I started doing mail-order for stuff that GHQ didn't make. Wow, I was a top-dog then, having exclusive access (among my friends) to a wide variety of vehicles at a time when the GHQ line was still fairly small. And, for the first time in our experience, having access to INFANTRY!
That was also the timeframe I started scratch-building aircraft. Later, in the early 1980s, I met a guy at the Reseda Blvd Last Grenadier shop who was a professional model-maker for Universal Studios. Wow, I got a quick lesson in what scratch-building could really achieve! His models were superb! (I remember his A-37 Dragonfly jet, and a Swedish STRV-103 "S" tanks in particular). By that time I was out of WW2 and focused on "moderns", and stayed with that focus for 20 some years. By the late 1980s I started molding and casting some of my models. Haven't done any of that since maybe the mid-1990s.
I still have most of the models I bought or scratch-built or casted during those times. These little gems are non-perishable. So when I finish painting up a unit, and put it into my "active forces" box, well to me it is like I've just acquired another life-long piece of treasure.
If you stick with this hobby, it can last you for a lot of years, you know?
And he then went to the book looking for rules on the use of tac nukes in response! 
