Model MAKiNG
70
TREASURE COAST BOATING
Tools for model making
must be able to pick up and
manipulate tiny parts, some of
which are many times smaller
than a human fingernail.
ED DRONDOSKI
Huggins says. The captain, Armin Elsaesser, and three crew
members drowned. The rest were saved several days later.
Huggins says he told his son-in-law the history of the ship
and discovered that its captain was his son-in-law’s cousin.
“So when I finished it, I gave the model to him,” Huggins says.
He isn’t sure how many model houses he has built, but it’s a
lot. He gained local fame from a news story after he made an
exact model of a Vero Beach packing house on U.S. 1 owned by
Ralph Sexton in 1999. “There were no plans,” Huggins says. “I
took pictures and measurements of every single thing.”
Then for a history event in Vero he made a whole set of
models after driving through several towns and choosing one
building from each town. One of the models that caught the
eye of visitors was of the historic Hallstrom Farmstead on
Old Dixie Highway. The farmstead is on the National Register
of Historic Places.
Huggins moved to Vero Beach more than 20 years ago,
finding it a welcome refuge from the cold of the Northeast.
“I’ve sailed all my life,” he says. “I used to sail to the
Caribbean and stay there for six months at a time.” But one
day he decided there was no point in returning to the north,
so he bought a house in Vero Beach, where he and his wife,
Jayne, moved. The couple will celebrate their 50th anniversary
in August.
Huggins found his way to Harbor Branch Oceanographic
Institute, where he volunteered in the engineering department
for many years. There, he sometimes built plastic models
of concepts developed by the engineers.
For a while he was a member of the Treasure Coast Model
Railroad Club, which operates from a former firehouse on
Becker Road in Port St. Lucie. The members construct their
own scenery, featuring towns, villages, landscapes and even a
port with ships.
Huggins has lived in four towns as an adult. All but Vero
are in New York state, all with Indian names. He reels them
off: “First, Mamaroneck, then Katonah, then Waccabuc.”
Everywhere he lived, he made models.
He helped catalog the items in the John Jay Homestead, a
national landmark at Katonah, and then at the curator’s request,
he made a model of the 200-plus-year-old home of Jay,
New York’s second governor and first chief justice of the U.S.
Supreme Court.
Huggins was so good at what he did that The New York
Times published an article on him about 25 years ago.
“If you’re good at something, you like to give back to the
community you live in and like,” he says. “So I gave a lot of
models to museums.”
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