(dramatic music) - [Advertiser] Illinois Stories is brought to you by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Illinois Arts Council Agency, and by the support of viewers like you.

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(dramatic music continues) - Hello and welcome to Illinois Stories.

I'm Mark McDonald in Sadorus, a small town just South of Champaign.

Maybe one of the last places you'd expect to find the National Museum of Ship Models and Sea History.

The museum motto pretty much says it all, the history of ships in an ocean of golden corn.

Charles Lozar when you come in the front door you're almost immediately confronted with some big models.

- Very big.

- Big models.

- Yes.

- In fact, we're gonna see one of yours.

It's 27 feet long.

- Yes.

- But we don't wanna put the cart before the horse.

We wanna just sort of work our way through here and we need to warn you and our audience too.

This is very tight quarters, isn't it?

In here.

- Yes, there's not much aisle space.

(Mark laughs) - You've got ship models wall to wall in this place.

- Probably over 300 in the museum now.

- It's amazing, it's just amazing.

And like I said, some of them are very large up to 27 feet.

How the heck did you get the idea to start a museum of ship models?

- Well, over the process of my interest in ship silver, about totaling maybe 50 years, I've been collecting forever.

And of course at a certain point the living room gets filled.

The garage gets filled.

The attic is, you can not move in the attic anymore.

And you get to a point where some of them are really beautiful and you really decide that you need to do something useful with them.

A lot of the process of coming up with the decision to do it was, you know, thinking about it for years and then finding a place that would be adequate for the space needs.

We were lucky to find a building in Sadorus because it had 14-foot ceilings in it, and as we go through, you will see that we do need it for the larger models with the high masts.

We still are short on floor space but on the other hand I can put shelves up and still display multiple models and periods of history.

- And you're fortunate because you're an architect.

So, planning space for you is not a big problem.

- No, until I get too many ships.

- Yeah.

- No matter the planner you are you've got too many ships.

- Right.

- Okay, I say, we're gonna start with some big ones.

The first one you see when come in on your right, is this model of a world war II German submarine?

- Right, it's actually the U-505, the same one that's in the Chicago Museum of Natural History.

And this model was built at Great Lakes Naval Training Station as an exercise for the guys in the shops to learn metal work.

So, most of the model is metal, (metal clanking) with wooden decks.

And it's got an interesting history in terms of where it goes.

It's 12 feet long.

And it went from someplace in Peoria to the quad cities, hanging from the ceiling in a bicycle shop.

(Mark laughs) Which is where I purchased it.

- Which is where you found it?

- Right.

(Mark laughs) - Now you've got a lot of curiosities here.

Some of the ones we're going to see are actually models from movies.

Hollywood makes ship models to pull through water because they haven't figured out a way to make water realistic yet, have they?

Because they use water.

- Right, particularly in the early movies up till about the eighties or the nineties models were the way to make the movie seem realistic.

And of course the size of the model is related to the fact that you can't make scale water and you can not make scale fire.

And those are the two rationales that you would use to film a model.

So, the solution is to make the model larger and use something like an electric winch to pull it along the railroad track about eight inches below the water level.

So, you can adjust the speed to match the filming rate and again, make the waves look correct.

- All of which we discussed because right behind me here is the model of the Titanic, the famous movie from the 1990s.

I think it was 1990s, wasn't it?

- Yes.

- James Cameron directed.

And this is really beautiful.

This was hanging in the green room and it was a smaller model than the model they actually used in the filming, I guess.

- Yes, actually the model builder for this model was from Australia and it was shipped in the case from Australia with the glass and it actually made it.

It's sort of a demonstration model but it's very accurate in terms of what the Titanic really looked like with all the cabins and the portals.

Has a great deal of history.

We actually have a couple of the newspaper articles published just after the Titanic sinks in the London Illustrated News.

So, we're able to track some of the history that goes along with the models.

And that's why you can see the museum is ship models and history.

Since we really do cover the history of the world.

- You can kind of see Leonardo DiCaprio sort of gazing at that between takes, you know, as he's always... - I was thinking of Kate Winslet.

Kate Winslet.

(both laugh) And above it, now this is lovely.

And this was a hand-made as well.

And a woman who you became acquainted with her husband made this before he passed away.

- Yes, he made it in Minneapolis and after he passed away from an illness, she shipped it down to the museum.

It's a nine-foot-long model of a clipper ship.

This one happens to be the Flying Cloud.

The clipper ship era of course was from about 1840 through the seventies, connecting with the China Trade and the Gold Rush to San Francisco.

Where speed meant you were getting to the gold fields, or you were bringing cargo back from the Far East.

You were in competition with the British until the steam ships and large cargo ships were able to compete.

- Wow, it is really intricate, that's a beautiful model.

Now, let's squeeze through here.

And I mean, squeeze.

- Yes.

- And move back this way because I wanna see this Queen Mary.

This is the largest model that you have in the museum.

It's a 27-feet-long.

And the curiosity here is it is made out of 100% toothpicks?

Is that right?

- Made out of 1 million toothpicks.

(Mark laughs) This model is exhibited on Navy Pier in Chicago.

(Mark sighs) It took eight years and eight gallons of Elmer's glue to make it.

It's made in three, nine-foot sections because the gentlemen Wayne Cosi, who built it, his living room was 11 feet long at that time on the sixth floor of an apartment building.

And consequently getting it here was very interesting.

- Oh, I'll bet.

- There is a website for the Queen Mary and toothpicks.

You can just click on it.

It comes up on YouTube.

(Mark laughs) - Oh, man, well, we're gonna see a cross section of this thing too because as you look where you say... Where you have it section, do you say it's a nine foot sections, you can see that in those cross sections you can see there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of toothpicks.

- And Mr. Cosi, as a child learned a finger maneuver with the toothpicks and the glue, creating small pyramids.

So, the interior structure of the entire model is made up of really small pyramids of toothpicks but it's very strong and lightweight and very accurate.

He had the United States coast guard fly over the real Queen Mary in Los Angeles in order to get the upper decks correct.

- Wow.

Let's look off to the left a little bit here.

And this isn't, talk about intricate work.

This Dutch galleon.

I don't know much about galleons.

This is from the, I guess the 1600s.

- Yeah, it would be from the 1640s, and the Dutch were the ones that did the Far East trade for spices, porcelain.

This one would have gone to anywhere from the Indonesian islands to China and brought back all sorts of things.

The model itself is about 120 years old.

There are three others in museums in Paris, and this was donated by a lovely lady from Dallas, Texas.

And it had been in the Belgian embassy.

All the wood is carved as you might imagine, the decking is correct and the rigging is just phenomenal.

The important thing to remember about a ship's rigging of course is that unlike the artists who do paintings, if you're in a storm and at sea, and it's a dangerous situation, you cannot reach up for a piece of fake rigging.

All rigging has a purpose and is connected to a line that hopefully is going to save your life in a desperate situation.

- Wow, okay, now lemme take one more look behind you.

Let's move over this way 'cause we're talking about movie set pieces.

I think most people remember, most people who are over the age of 50, remember, the movie Cleopatra, with Liz Taylor and Richard, Richard Burton, right?

- Right.

- And this was actually used in some of the scenes, wasn't it?

- Yes, if you rent the movie you will see this model in the Harbor of Alexandria as a Roman galley brings a Marc Antony to Wu Cleopatra.

Now movie models, as I said are large and this one is nine feet long.

The intent here is to move the model through the water.

But as you can see with the oars sticking out of it we don't have room here to put the oars on but the way in which it was done is very interesting because the model moves on a railroad track.

And if you come over here you can see on the interior of the model there's a large gear that rotates.

- Oh, yeah.

- As the gear rotates it lifts up a wooden rack, and on the edge of the wooden rack are hinges to which the oars are attached.

So, the oars make a circular path and you were thinking that Richard Burton actually sweated below decks.

- Yeah.

- But most of the movie models are... (Mark laughs) Of this type where mechanical devices were used to simulate the real action on-site.

Most movie models too were discarded and left on outside in the weather, in the rain.

So, this one, we're just in the process of restoring but not quite done with the rigging yet.

- Yeah.

Charles back in 1970, 20th Century Fox made an Epic movie about Pearl Harbor called Tora Tora Tora.

And there were a number of tankers in that movie.

They'd got sunk, blown up and sunk.

And you've got one of the models.

- Yes, I was lucky to purchase this at an auction in San Francisco when I was a student, and we brought it back.

It's 16 feet long, it had 600 pounds of lead weights in it.

- Wow, wow.

- Again, it's towed by, by little winch under a railroad track underneath the water.

My nephew who is now in aerospace engineering restored it over a period of four years.

And in the movie, if you rent the movie, you'll see that it's painted gray in the original movie and gets blown up in the first 10 minutes, as the Japanese attack our shipping.

Most of the models of this size are simple wood frame with canvas stretched over it and painted with a sealer so that we can get at least an hour worth of floating and then proceed on to cut to 15 to 40 seconds worth of actual filming.

- An hour's worth, so you don't have to last for long.

Anyway.

- No.

- Of course, it'll last forever in here.

Okay, now, we're gonna look at a couple of interesting things here.

As we move into this room, you can see that the Cunard Cruise Line has an interesting history and you've got a number of models that chart that.

- We tried to combine the models with original advertising from Cunard.

And of course they still operate in various ways, even in airlines.

And so the cruising itself as a venture for vacations has changed character where you do not now go back and forth to Europe.

But at the time after world war two, cruising on the Queen Mary and other ships was really a very big business.

- Yeah.

- And supported a lot of liners, including the France and a number of unique ships that are now disappeared.

- Speaking of the Queen Mary, you know, we saw the model that you have there.

You have another model, and this is kind of like a cross section of the state rooms and all that goes on on a big cruise ship.

It's really neat the way this is done.

- This is an actual interior model of the Queen Mary.

It was built by a gentlemen from Louisville, Kentucky, who was a newspaper editor and did it in his spare time out of simple card stock.

(Mark chuckles) But it's very, very accurate in terms of the decks and the salons.

And he did a beautiful job and all the little nine year old girls come to the museum.

- Its like a doll house for them.

- They get stuck at this location.

- The other thing that's interesting we can't see in here with the camera because it's just not logistically possible but each one of the rooms has a porthole.

And if you want to you can look into each one of the rooms.

- There's even a wedding, (Mark laughs) a cabin that has a bottle of champagne and a little like a camera sitting on the deck.

- Oh, wow.

That's fun.

That is fun.

Okay, now, we have down here below this is another long noddle.

This is probably something like 10 feet long I guess.

- You're very proud of this.

- Yes, this is what's called a builder's model.

It was built by the steamship company for display.

It's a hundred years old.

It's a Martha Washington, the Martha Washington sister ship was George Washington.

On which, Roosevelt signed world war one's peace treaty on.

Martha Washington went to the Balkans back and forth.

In the cargo, mostly immigrants to Ellis Island in New York.

But the accuracy of the model is just phenomenal.

- It's beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

Now, and this, you can't overlook this because as you say the rigging on this thing is really top notch.

- This is a model made out of teak and hardwoods.

The model was built in the island, right?

Shipped from Ceylon where the original hall was built.

And it is the French frigate, the Lafluer, from the war of 1812.

But again, the models are valuable in the sense that the rigging is correct.

And so this model in particular is just beautifully done.

Probably about a hundred years old.

- Wow, it is phenomenal.

A lot of study goes into making these models, I can tell.

- Yes, you can.

When you you build a model of a ship you're really building an accurate like replica that pretty much reflects what was necessary for the seamen to actually sail it safely.

And so, consequently, that's why we're so sensitive to the accuracy of the rigging since your life depended on knowing where the lines were and what their purpose was.

- Now, we mentioned movie, movie sets.

I love these movie sets that you've got here.

These models, this first big one, this looks like it's actually been in the water a long time.

(Mark chuckles) - Well, actually it was mainly in the rain in Los Angeles on Universal Studios' lot for a long time.

It's from 1938.

It was used in the movie Lady Hamilton which was the captain to Nelson's Cohen concert, and during the Battle of Trafalgar.

Which of course was the English defeating, the Spanish Mada.

The models are very, very large for the same reason.

And again, this one is made out of layers of Oak pinned together and probably weighs over 800 pounds.

It's on a truck.

The interesting thing about trying to restore a model like this, as you can see it gets somewhat destroyed out in the model lot and so the rigging gets rotted.

Finding appropriately twined rigging that's of the right scale to restore the model required bringing back twined from Shanghai, China about four years ago.

- Wow.

- Which is an interesting experience going through customs.

- And then right behind it is another.

And this one, I think people, most people who remember the movie Showboat from Porgy and Bess.

- Yes, it's Showboat from Porgy and Bess.

And this models that are used in the movies are sometimes constructed initially for the movie and then rented out to other studios, particularly if you're going to destroy a model.

So, in this one we've had to build the upper decks again with the smokestacks and we're getting close to being done on it, the parts.

The movie models are never made to the same scale, which makes it difficult to restore them because you can't go out and buy anything, and everything has to be handmade, which is very time consuming.

- Charles, the Robert E. Lee, from Gone with the Wind.

- Yes.

- It's one of the greatest movies ever made and you've got the model.

- I've got the model.

(Marks laughs) The model unfortunately it didn't have a big part in the movie.

It was a distance shot, just floated on the river with the lights on, but it gave a lot of character to what was going on in Gone with the Wind, in the Southern, the transport of course was up and down the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers during the civil war which is what the whole movie was about.

Riverboats and steamboats are unusual in the sense that most people, most model builders don't build them because they're a little simplistic.

But they do represent tremendous periods of history.

The model in front of us right now.

- Are we looking at this one here?

- Yes.

- Okay.

- With the small cable cars in it.

Was a ferry that ran the cable cars across San Francisco Bay in the 1890s through 1930s.

The model is again unusual because it's built by a Czecho-Slovakian builder who starts them from scratch and assembles everything himself.

A large model behind it is the ferryboat model which still exists in San Francisco's Maritime Museum.

It's the Sacramento which was a side-wheeler, which went up and down the Sacramento River carrying passengers in the early 1920s from San Francisco, of course to the Capital of Sacramento.

- And then there's another ferry, the City of Key West I guess it's a ferry boat in it.

- Yeah, the City of Key West still exists.

I don't know if it's operational or not but the model is accurate representation of the early steamboat.

The unusual thing about this is that you can see it has a walking beam engine which translated the steam power into rotation for the side wheels rather than a propeller.

And this gave you a lot more attraction.

Turning still became an issue, but with the appropriate gearing, you could turn one side wheel and also feather the pedals on the side wheel for power.

The steamboats represent a real big period of history in Inland America, in terms of transporting goods and getting people to the West and even carried wagon trains to Missouri before they began the trek westward to the Gold Rush.

- Well, Charles we're looking at a Swedish ship here was a kind of a point of embarrassment for the King of Sweden at one point in the 1500s, wasn't it?

- Yes, the King ordered one of the largest warships ever made in Europe.

Had a lot of gilding put on it and lot of curving.

Had a big ceremony for the launching.

(Mark laughs) And as it was launched, it sank in front of them in 30 minutes.

- Oh, my goodness.

- Partially because they had left the gun ports open.

So, as it was launched water poured in.

The ship actually was named the Vasa and it sank into the mud of Stockholm and was preserved there for almost 350 years.

It's only in this century that it was excavated with power washing machinery and is now in a museum in Stockholm sprayed constantly with water preservative over a period of 20 years.

- Wow.

- To preserve the timbers.

So, you actually can walk around the real ship that the model represents.

Basically, the moral is close your hatches before you launch your ship.

(Mark laughs) - Now, directly below it.

This is an interesting story too, because in England, I guess it was England, the King wanted to approve a ship builder, ship building, with a model first, right?

- Right, it was called an Admiralty Model, which essentially meant that the Navy Admiralty would present it to the King.

The unique thing about it is that the structure is the actual representation in model form of the real structure on the ship.

So, after the King approved it, it was taken to the shipyard and the carpenters would measure off of the model to construct the timbers, placing them in place.

And so we had a number of reviews before the actual ship was approved.

Once the haul was approved then usually the rigging was left to the captain.

- So, the model was more than just something to play around with.

This was gonna be the actual scale to which the finished ship was going to be held.

- And to a great extent, the problem was that they could not draw the models correctly.

So, they worked right off of them.

The other models you're looking at are the USS Constellation which is an American frigate.

Still now off the coast of, or off the city of Baltimore.

One of the favorite models that we have in the museum here is one of six models of the Endeavor that was constructed for Australia's bicentennial about 15 years ago.

- Wow.

- It was kept in cooks model, or kept in cook ship.

That he went to the South Pacific and did a number of research articles on local flora and fauna.

The model itself was constructed by a gentleman named Tim.

And when it arrived in Illinois I called him and complimented him on the rigging which he then said he didn't do, his wife does it on the kitchen table.

(Mark laughs) She doesn't absolutely beautiful job of rigging (Mark laughs) where everything is perfect.

- There's a marriage made in heaven, isn't it?

- Yes, yes.

- But Charles I remember as a kid, remembering Charlton Heston's Ben-Hur.

That movie was scary and it was heroic.

It was everything.

- Yes.

The whole story of Ben-Hur was dramatic.

There's a certain scene in the model, in the movie, where they use nine large models of Roman galleys and Greek galleys.

There's a large war between Greece and Rome and of course, they go up in flames.

The models themselves were nine or seven feet long, which this one is.

This is one of the original ones constructed out of metal, with aluminum castings.

And in the picture that you were looking at it is the same one that is burning which is why I had to restore the upper decks.

The oars would go, of course, go in the porthole and you'd have multitudinous slaves pulling the model or pulling the ship along during war time.

At the time Ben-Hur was done, marine archeology had not discovered many of the early shipping artifacts left but now the representation that was used in this type of model was actually turning out to be pretty accurate compared to what's been found in the Mediterranean underwater.

This whole area of the museum here represents primitive English ships and Roman ships.

All the way from artifacts that relate to ships like on the wall there is a pattern.

- Are we looking here?

- Yes, you're looking there.

And that's a skirt from the Amazon, from one of the ladies that would use it as a sarong.

Above your head is one of the Reed boats that is actually from the Lake in Peru but was used as the model for a thorough hydraulics proof that people could make it from South America to the Far East.

If you remember, he sank part ways but he did make the entire trip.

So, the periods of history that are represented in the museum are connected through clipper ships, through trading and through exploration all over the world from the orient, which is why we call the museum, model ships and sea history.

It really is the history of the exploration of the world.

- The museum is open on Saturdays from 11 to five.

There is an admission charge, but if you wanna bring a group some other time, just call ahead and make arrangements.

With another Illinois Story in Sadorus, I'm Mark MacDonald.

Thanks for watching.

(dramatic music) - [Advertiser] Illinois Stories is brought to you by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Illinois Arts Council Agency and by the support of viewers like you.

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