Many hesitate to get into the hobby of model building, particularly model railroading. Building things has always given people great satisfaction in life, perhaps because that is what we were meant to do.
In my particular case, at the early age of grade school I had trains given to me by my elders on holidays and birthdays. It seemed like I always had plenty of time to play with or work on them until high school. Between high school and going to college, like many at that age, I was short on time, money, and space.
However, I remained in the hobby and kept subscriptions to Model Railroader Magazine and membership in the National Model Railroad Association (NMRA) so I could get the NMRA Bulletin. At least I could afford that and dream. As it turned out, I learned a good deal from absorbing all those articles until eventually managing to build models once again.
Without realizing it, one particular editor had a rather profound influence not only on me but on the model railroad community at large. That would have been Whit Towers. Whit was president of the NMRA (1968 – 1969). When he stepped down, Whit took the helm as editor of the NMRA Bulletin. His tenure lasted until the end of 1978. During his time as editor, his work led to a significant increase in NMRA membership over that period.
It is typical of folks that have a passing interest in the hobby to pick up a magazine here and there, and perhaps less so today because everything is online. I still have all my magazines saved over the years in my reference library and enjoy them to this day. The advantage of having the subscriptions over a 10 or 20 year period coming in monthly is to have a good feel for how the community is doing as a whole.
The Biffy Wars Begin
It just so happens Whit developed some controversy in the community and with the membership, which I will explain in a minute. One might not pick up on it or the significance without monitoring the Bulletin month after month over those years. Like any editor, he was always looking for authors to contribute, and it was probably always a task to fill in open spaces, so he had to be creative along with the technical duties required to be a good editor within his budget limitations.
Early in the 1970s, Whit slowly introduced the community to the polite term called the “Biffy”—slang for the outhouse or privy. Often, these would be tongue-in-cheek cartoonish caricatures or even serious modeling articles. As time progressed, readers kept noticing these showing up frequently in the Bulletin, sometimes as jokes or just references to the privy.
I thought of this at the time as the Biffy Wars because letters started coming into the editor, which he published in the section called “Blowing Off Steam.” Soon it became clear there were two camps: the Pro-Privy and the Anti-Privy people. In a word, controversial encapsulates the ongoing scene within the periodical. The arguments ranged from contentious to divisive to downright polarizing. Remember, the Internet was not publicly accessible until 1991, so the evolution took time for things to heat up in a media that was a paper based periodical.
Some of the Anti-Privy folks wrote that unless things changed with his so-called infatuation with the Biffy, they were going to drop their membership. The Pro-Privy crowd always seemed to provide the best support for Whit, but low and behold, one could not get a better education when it came to the American institution known as the outhouse.
There were serious model projects not just about your basic biffy, but state-of-the-art privies. Notoriety aside, the history was a large part few considered. Most rural stations with no indoor plumbing had outhouses off to the corner or behind the buildings. Section crews required facilities consideration that might be found at non-agency stations or section houses where track crews lived or worked. Like any serious modeling project, basic research is sometimes required unless one is only freelancing with no particular prototype in mind.
Why It Mattered
In the end, the subtle conclusion one could draw was the fact that through his publishing, Whit Towers kept people involved. Not only via the Bulletin but at model railroad clubs, division, regional and national meets, you could always hear the latest Biffy jokes. It did not overwhelm the publication; it just irritated a small group of readers. It kept members going to the back pages of the Bulletin to read the latest steam people were blowing off toward the editor or perhaps each other in respectable ways.
Along with the funnies that Milt “Thumbs” Moore created, it was entertaining. Plus, I learned so much from all the railroad documentation and model projects that it was probably the best investment I ever had in the hobby, and it kept me going during the lean years and no time on my hands to build models.
Perhaps the most entertaining was the November 1978 issue where friends gathered to roast the Bulletin editor at the April 28, 1978 P.C.R. Convention in Phoenix, Arizona to pay tribute to Whit. The theme was “Whitney’s Wonderful Water Closet Museum,” billed as the world’s largest collection (in HO scale) of this taboo slice of Americana. And that my friends is one facet of why Model Railroading is Fun!
