We have suggested pathways to success of T-to-the-Fourth-Power (Trolleys, Trams, Traction, and Transit) organizations, and we can (and have) sat back smugly waiting to hear your success stories. We're going to submit our suggestions to the ultimate test, putting them into action, and see just how they work for us.
This past week, I witnessed personally how a small hobby group at a 2,000-person community --- in a modest retirement area of Florida --- have grown, from scratch, a program of events and amateur sales, using only volunteer assistance from a small total membership --- maybe 40 or 50 --- into a fund-raising sales event at which people started lining up early in the morning, hours before the announced opening, to browse and buy goods donated by residents of the community, and jammed the aisles until closing, carting away a very high percentage of the goods of mixed value and utility, to have a large group of volunteers carefully pack everything up, leaving behind a clean, empty activity hall as mute witness to a frenzy of buying that reminded us of nothing so much as the pre-Christmas retail panic buying of Black Friday.
We smiled to ourselves as we recalled comments made by some of our correspondents :
1. "Florida ? It's too warm !" (the outside temperature this January was 60 degrees Fahrenheit) ,
2. "We prefer holding our events in places that are easy to get to" , (like the gymnasiums of universities that require that maps be published to find)
3. "No one will come that distance", (this from a group that scheduled their event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and were surprised (we imagine !) when they had to cancel the program for lack of pre-attendance registration
Our visitors / buyers came from Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ontario, New Jersey, and on and on and on ... Build it and they will come ! .. maybe not the first year, we were not present, or the second, but building on what they had, year after year.
We understand that many appear to have headed afterward to nice restaurants in the vicinity, based on their questions to us. Nice for the neighborhood, and the economy, too.
The other example dangled before our eyes this past week was a show and administrative meeting held by a State organization of highly specialized collectors in a luxury beach-front resort in St. Pete Beach [official short name for St. Petersburg Beach, Florida) where these collectors (in their 50's, 60's, and 70's) showed up a week early in reserved rooms and suites, where they held informal in-room trading and buying sessions before the official show itself, and then stayed for the four-day-long State Show, which was advertised in national periodicals and so-called house organs.
We said to ourselves : If those people can do it, and if we can talk about it to you as our audience, why can't we try it --- on a small scale at first. Maybe hold a free Trolley Film Festival, if we can get a suitable venue; order some good traction videos from Jim Herron, up in the Greater Tampa Bay area, and try to launch a small club.
We envision using that club as a base :
- working towards regular meetings;
- discussing construction of traction equipment in the larger unappreciated scales --- yes, larger than O and G scales
- moving toward acquring a regular meeting place
- attracting new, young people to the hobby
- asking skilled old-timers to teach building skills to teenagers and youngsters, perhaps through Scout groups
- seeing if we could work with the school system, currently in under-funded disarray
- Public Relations
- Public Relations, and
- Public Relations (our equivalent of the Real Estate : Location, Location, and Location)
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