Casey Rupley (webmaster)

With Thanksgiving just a few weeks out and the end of the year approaching, it’s a good time to take stock and provide a status update on the club.

At our October 4th meeting, the club re-elected the six elected members of the E-Board.  Our line-up for 2025 therefore will be Patrick Dick, Jim Coatney and Robert Henderson as Pro-Tem members, Ken Liotta as Contest Director, Frank Randall as Secretary-Treasurer and Scott Jaworski as VP.  I will serve another year as President.  The current E-Board crew gets along well and is focused on working for the club.  We are also lucky to have our club media managers, Casey Rupley and James Barrett, who continue to bring us state-of-the-art IT services.

Looking ahead to the coming year, the club is on the right track with a focus on modeling, with additional activities such as guest speakers, swap meets and local displays to provide interest to members.  Best news of all is our club treasury balance is stable and our club is in the black.

Our club contests are the heart of our meetings.  I would like to thank all of our members who participated this year in our points contests and special contests, and my fellow contestants for Modeler of the Year.  I participated in the MoY contest this year because I believe the president of a model club should be able to show his stuff on the contest tables once in awhile, but there is no question there are many club members who are better modelers than me and I am in awe of their modeling ability and craftsmanship.  I’ve been a member of ASM since 1995 but the best modeling talent we’ve ever had is in our club ranks right now.

We are lucky to be living in great times for the scale modeling hobby.  There never has been selection and quality like there is right now and the aftermarket business has completely transformed the hobby.  Over the years I’ve heard many gloom-and-doom predictions for the end of scale modeling and have seen many changes, like the transformation from a hobby shop-focused hobby to a global online hobby marketplace, but we are still hanging in there building models.  The future for us is still bright.

At the December 4th meeting, we will have the Model of the Year showdown, to determine which best-of-show models are selected as the best models in each skill level, and a Peoples Choice contest to see which of these models is the most popular.  Click here to see which models are eligible.  Looking forward to our next meeting and hope we have a great send-off for the 2024 modeling year.

John Tate
ASM President