Basement Admiral

Gardner T. Brookings '53 is an associate professor of civil construction technology at Erie Community College in western New York but he has never outgrown his dream of being a naval architect. And while the Buffalo area isn't known as one of the nation's largest ship building centers, Brookings has built a formidable fleet of ship models in his basement.

His 35 plank-on-frame scale models, which range in length from three inches to more than six feet, include fishing schooners, a fourmasted coasting schooner, a brig, a Thames River barge, and a New Haven sharpie. They're made with painstaking detail, down to the ship's bell blocks and turnbuckles.

"There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of knots on each boat," Brookings says. "It irritates many people to do this sort of detail work, but for me it's relaxation. It's a great escape from the everyday pressures. It's the 'character-building' stuff we used to hear so much about - tedium and repetition."

But Brookings has translated the tedium and repetition into scale models that are so accurate that even the half-hitch knots are made correctly on each cleat. His models are the products of many months of research, for he pores over ship and sail designs and photographs for hints on rigging lines and fittings.

Several years ago Brookings bought a plastic model of the USS Constitution, the famous "Old Ironsides" that now rests in Boston Harbor. "When I was finished, all I had was a plastic kit - nothing else," he recalls. "Someone else had done all the research. I vowed not to make another plastic boat."

So he now chooses his own subjects and usually takes about two years to complete work on each model. He tries to build boats other people don't build because, as he says, "There must be 10,000 models of the Cutty Sark." Future projects include a lumber hooker (the early powered lumber boats that sailed out of nearby Tonawanda, New York) and a fleet of a dozen Swampscott dories.

"It's a hobby for introverts," Brookings says. "I only do it for my own satisfaction. I don't have enough room to keep these things around here, but I love to see them. I'm satisfied just to sit and stare at them."