Bill Fox
My interest in modeling began at age 13 with operating model boats. I bought a Cox Water Wizard hydroplane airboat model, and to my great surprise and delight, my Dad bought me a .049 engine for it. A Newport News native, I grew up in Riverside between the Mariners’ Museum and the James River. The Museum Lake was a great place to run boats; and we made friends at the Newport News Shipyard, NNS, Hydraulic Laboratory, where they let us run our boats in their towing tank. And we often flew U-control planes in the Museum’s parking lot. I built an operating model of CSS Virginia for a school history project in the 10th grade; it was displayed at the Museum with the HRSMS models last year.
I continued modeling and flying model airplanes at Virginia Tech and during the summers. After graduation in 1965, I went to work for Esso International in New York and was then sent to Genoa, Italy, for almost three years. Model planes were not so popular there, but ship model kits were. I built a Corel kit of HMS Bounty and became a ship modeler. The Corel kits were relatively high quality and not expensive, so I followed with their Half Moon and Victory Midship Section. Returning to Virginia in 1971, I discovered the Corel kits were unavailable here, so I started importing and selling them as Marittima Models. Around 1974 I joined the HRSMS and was asked by a New York friend to write an article about ship modeling for the Time-Life book series, Family Creative Workshop. For this, I built and wrote about a model of the gundalow Philadelphia of 1776. This began my writing career. In 1975, working at NNS, I re-searched and built a 1:64 model of the tugboat Dorothy, their Hull No. 1, of 1891. This research and the model were used for the restoration of the tug itself in 1976.
Leaving Newport News again, in 1976, I worked for the Iranian navy at Bandar Abbas for two years. I was lucky to live aboard the former Italian liner T/N Michelangelo, in use for naval housing there. In my spare time I restored a WW II vintage Montague sailing whaleboat and built Corel’s HMS Endeavour for display aboard the ship. When I returned to Virginia in 1978, I couldn’t bear to leave the model in Iran, so I derigged it and carried it home in a suitcase. Restoring this model has now become a 40-year project. The masts, spars and standing rigging were completed, but then I started writing books and restored two 28-foot boats. I reconnected with the HRSMS last year and have just finished my “last” book. Now work on the Endeavour will finally proceed. Hopefully.