What Happened to Comet? The Model Airplane Company America Forgot

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: In 1929 two teenagers in Chicago started a model airplane company with $5. By the 1930s it was the largest model kit manufacturer in America. By 1998 it disappeared into a paperwork filing that almost no one noticed. There was no factory fire, no auction, no crowd of laid-off workers walking out through a chain link gate for the last time. Comet Model Airplane and Supply Company did not die the way most companies on this channel die. It simply faded decade after decade until the name meant nothing to the people who bought it. But here is the strange part. The company that eventually erased Comet was not a stranger. It was built in part by Comet's own people. A man who cut parts on Comet's factory floor in 1931 would go on to found one of the biggest names in American plastic model kits. And the molds Comet once used to build its own future were sold, quietly, to the company that would help end it. Comet did not just lose to its competitors. In more ways than one, Comet built them. Every week we tell the stories behind the toys and the factories that built American childhoods. Give the video a like and subscribe if you want to keep hearing them. The story begins in Chicago, Illinois in 1929. The west side of Chicago, in 1929, was not a place that made airplanes. It made steel and sausage and noise. But two teenage boys who attended Crane Tech High School were paying closer attention to the sky than to their textbooks. Bill Bibichkow, who would later go by the name Bill Bishop, wanted a full scale glider. He didn't have the money for one. So he decided to build small models and sell them instead, just long enough to raise the cash. He never bought the glider. He built something bigger. Bishop started with five dollars, not five hundred. Five. That was the entire capital behind what would become the largest model airplane manufacturer in the United States. Sam Goldenberg, another Crane Tech student, joined him almost immediately. Soon after, Louis Capp came aboard as their first salesman, walking the models door to door, hobby shop to hobby shop, convincing strangers that a boy's paper airplane hobby was worth a dime. The three of them called it the Comet Model Airplane and Supply Company. They set up shop at 2509 West Cermac Road, a Chicago street better known for meatpacking than model aviation. There was no product line waiting for them. There was no catalog, no factory, no name recognition. What they had was a gap nobody else had filled. A country full of boys who had just watched Charles Lindbergh cross the Atlantic Ocean and who wanted desperately to hold a piece of that dream in their own two hands. Existing kits were expensive, built for adults with patience and money. Comet's founders believed a ten-year-old with a dime should be able to buy one too. They didn't even have money for glue, so they made their own, melting down old celluloid window material with acetone until it turned into a usable adhesive. It worked well enough to sell. The first Comet catalog reached hobby shops in 1931. Bishop designed the models himself. Goldenberg cut the parts. Capp sold them across the city, one shop at a time. That same year, a struggling competitor called the Silver Ace Company went under, and Comet bought what was left of it, including a glue tube filling machine that let them finally stop bottling adhesive by hand. A young man named Robert Reeder joined the company that same year, 1931, taking a job on Comet's production floor. At the time, he was simply one more worker cutting balsa parts for dime store airplane kits. No one at Comet had any reason to remember his name. They would have reason to, eventually. Robert Reeder would leave Comet years later and help found a company called Monogram Models, a name that would go on to dominate American hobby shops for decades to come, and one this channel has already told the story of. But in 1931, that future belonged to no one. What Comet had was a $5 idea that was starting, slowly, to work. By the middle of the decade, it was working faster than anyone expected. By the mid-1930s, Comet's small west side operation had become something else entirely. The company that started with $5 was now selling more than 1 million model airplane kits a year, with a workforce of roughly 300 people cutting, packaging, and shipping balsa wood dreams out of Chicago. America was in the middle of the Great Depression. Money was scarce everywhere, and Comet's answer to that was not to retreat. It was to go smaller and cheaper on purpose. They called it the "dime scale line," complete flying model kits priced low enough that a boy's weekly allowance could cover one. In a decade when families were counting nickels, Comet built an empire out of the ones nobody thought they had left to spend. The advertisements ran in model airplane news, month after month, promising more plane for less money than anyone else on the shelf. It worked. By 1939, Time magazine itself took notice, reporting that Comet planned to double its output for the coming year, bundling together 10 million model sets to be built and flown by, as the magazine put it, "youngsters and hobby-minded oldsters all across the country." 10 million kits, from a company that had started in a rented space on Cermak Road less than a decade earlier. Behind the scenes, Comet had assembled a design team most competitors could only envy: six draftsmen and eight designers at the boards, turning out drawings for scale models of nearly every American military and commercial aircraft flying at the time, along with a fair number of foreign designs too. And in 1939, Comet made its most important hire. They brought on a 26-year-old modeler named Carl Goldberg, a competitor so dominant that he had just won five of the six first place trophies at the National Aeronautic Association's model contest in Detroit. Goldberg arrived at Comet with a suitcase full of trophies and gave up his amateur status to do it professionally. Goldberg's designs became the company's signature, the Clipper, and in 1940, the Zipper, a gas-powered stunt model that sold for $4.50, a serious sum for a toy in 1940, and won families paid anyway because nothing else flew like it. But the company's identity had never been about one designer, however talented. It was about a piece of box art that promised more than paper and balsa wood ever should have been able to deliver. Comet's covers showed airplanes banking hard against violent orange skies, engines roaring, wingtips catching sunlight that no photograph of the period could have captured. For a boy standing in a Chicago hobby shop with a dime in his pocket, that painting was the entire sales pitch. The plane inside the box never looked quite as fast as the one on the lid. It didn't need to. The lid was the dream. The model was just the proof you tried to build it. By 1937, one kid in particular had captured that dream better than most. A stunt biplane called the Grumman Gulf Hawk, based on the real aircraft flown by legendary aerobatic pilot Al Williams. It became one of the most requested kits in the Comet catalog, the kind of box that sat in a hobby shop window and pulled boys in off the sidewalk. Comet's success wasn't built by three founders alone. By the late 1930s, the company employed enough people that it kept a nurse on staff to handle workplace injuries, offered coffee breaks that were still a rarity in American factories, and printed its own in-house newsletter for employees. For a company that started with $5, that was not overhead. That was proof they'd built something permanent. Hobby shops across the country stocked the Comet line as a matter of course by the end of the decade. The kind of shelf presence smaller manufacturers spent years chasing and never caught. And Comet had leverage most competitors didn't. It owned its own supply chain, from the glue it mixed by hand to the printwood it cut in-house. Then came 1941. As war spread across Europe and the Pacific, the United States government came looking for companies that could produce something very specific: small, accurate scale models of enemy and allied aircraft, used to train soldiers, sailors, and civilian spotters to recognize a plane in the sky in the two or three seconds they might actually have to identify it. The government hired Comet to design and produce those kits. It was not a glamorous wartime contract. There were no headlines. But it meant Comet's drafting tables, the same ones that had drawn stunt biplanes and dime store gliders, were now producing recognition models, the U.S. Navy, and the Department of Education, used to train people who might otherwise mistake a friendly aircraft for an enemy one, or the reverse. When balsa wood itself became difficult to source under wartime rationing, Comet adapted, building some of those recognition models first from base wood, and eventually shifting toward a material the company had barely touched before: injection molded plastic. No one at Comet knew it yet, but that wartime shift, five years before the war even ended, was the first quiet appearance of the material that would eventually make the entire wood and tissue model kit obsolete. For now, though, Comet was still on top. The workforce was busy. The catalog was full. Boys across America still knew the name on site, the way they knew Wrigley's or Schwinn. Nothing about 1941 looked like the beginning of the end. But 400 miles away, and a decade in the future, a new kind of model kit was about to walk into American hobby shops. And it wasn't made of balsa wood at all. The first crack in Comet's empire didn't look like a crack at all. It looked like a new product on a rival's shelf. In the years after World War II, a British company called Frog had already proven that plastic model kits could work. American manufacturers took notice. And in 1946, two U.S. companies released the first all-plastic model kits this country had ever seen. One was a submarine in a training plane from a company called Varney. The other came from a small outfit called Hawk. Neither kits sold particularly well at first. Hobby shop owners didn't know what to make of them. Plastic felt cheap. Foreign. Wrong for a hobby built on the smell of balsa wood and dope. Comet, watching from its position at the top of the industry, had every reason to believe the wood and tissue kit would remain king. That belief would cost them the next three decades. While Comet kept its drafting tables focused on stick and tissue construction, a handful of competitors began quietly investing in something Comet had no real experience with: injection molding. Plastic could be produced faster than balsa could be hand cut. It didn't warp in humidity. It didn't require a boy's father to help him steam and bend a wing spar at the kitchen table. And critically, plastic parts came pre-shaped, pre-detailed, straight out of a steel mold, a level of precision no amount of skilled balsa cutting could match. Comet did not ignore plastic entirely. In the years following the war, the company did produce some plastic kits of its own, including a line of aircraft models sold under the Comet name. But the company's core identity, its engineering culture, its factory floor, remained built around the rubber-powered, stick-and-tissue flying model, the very product that had made it famous in the 1930s. And the market that had once rewarded that identity was starting, quietly, to shrink. By the late 1940s, demand for wood construction kits was already softening. Returning veterans had less patience for a hobby that took a full Saturday afternoon to assemble something that might crash on its first flight. A new generation of boys wanted something faster to build, faster to fly, and increasingly, powered by a small gas engine rather than a twisted rubber band. In January of 1948, less than 20 years after Bill Bishop had started the company with $5, Comet Model Airplane and Supply Company was sold. Records from the period don't give a detailed account of exactly who orchestrated the sale or what internal pressures forced the founders' hands. What is clear is the timing. The sale came at the exact moment the American model kit market was beginning its long pivot away from everything Comet had built its name on. The company that emerged from that 1948 sale kept the Comet name. It kept much of the catalog. What it did not keep, in the years that followed, was Comet's position at the top of the industry. The company that would eventually take the ground Comet was losing did not exist yet in 1948. It was still years away from its first kit. But when it finally arrived, it would build its plastic model empire, in part, on tooling that once belonged to Comet itself. Sometime in the mid-1950s, the exact date lost to incomplete company records, Comet made a decision that marked the true end of its era as an industry leader. The company exited the plastic model kit business entirely and sold its plastic molds to a rising competitor: Aurora Plastics Corporation. It is worth sitting with that for a moment. Aurora was, by the mid-1950s, becoming exactly what Comet had once been to the model kit world in the 1930s. The fast-moving, fast-growing name every hobby shop wanted on its shelves. And the molds Aurora used to help build that reputation, at least, in part, came from the company Aurora was replacing. Comet did not lose those molds in a bankruptcy auction. There was no forced liquidation, no creditor seizing assets off a factory floor. Comet sold them, deliberately, choosing to step back from the plastic side of the business rather than compete in it. It was a retreat dressed up as a transaction. And it meant that somewhere in an Aurora factory, on a production line building Aurora's own model planes, sat steel that Comet's own engineers had once designed, cut, and shaped by hand. The irony ran deeper than the molds. Robert Reeder, the young man who had joined Comet's production floor back in 1931, cutting balsa parts for dime store kits, had long since left the company. He went on to help found Monogram Models, a plastic model kit manufacturer that would grow into one of the most recognized names in American hobby history, eventually rivaling Aurora itself for shelf space and hobby shops from coast to coast. Comet had trained him. Comet had employed him at the very start of his career. And the company he helped build would go on to outsell, outlast, and eventually help define the plastic model era that Comet chose to walk away from. By the time the 1960s arrived, the company's identity had narrowed considerably. Comet increasingly concentrated on flying-scale rubber-powered models, the exact product category that had made it famous three decades earlier, but one that was steadily losing ground to plastic kits and the growing popularity of gas-powered control line models. The very engines companies like Cox and Wenmac were racing to perfect. Comet's Structo Speedline, once a steady seller, was phased out. The company that had once promised 10 million kits a year to Time Magazine was no longer setting the pace of the industry. It was following it, from a growing distance behind. No factory closed that year. No headline announced a collapse. The decline of Comet model airplane and supply company would not happen in a single dramatic year. It would happen slowly, over three more decades, one shrinking catalog at a time. There is no dramatic final shift at Comet. No factory whistleblowing for the last time. No crowd of workers walking out through a gate that would never reopen. What happened to Comet model airplane and supply company was slower, and in some ways harder to watch, because it never gave the people who loved the brand a single moment to mourn. By the 1970s, the company that once employed 300 people and shipped 10 million kits a year had become something smaller and quieter. It operated out of a facility at 501 West 35th Street in Chicago. Still producing rubber-powered flying models, still selling kits with names like the Cloudbuster and the Flyboy, beginner-level trainers meant to teach a new generation of boys the same balsa and tissue skills their fathers had learned from Comet decades earlier. Vito Garofalo, who had joined Comet after returning home from service in World War II, served as the company's manager of engineering and chief designer through this period. He was, by every account available, meticulous, the kind of engineer who drafted plans with the same care in 1963 as he had in 1948. That year, a 30-inch wingspan model called the Piper Cub Cruiser, one of Garofalo's designs, was still listed in Comet's current catalog, priced at $13.95. It had been in continuous production for 32 years. But longevity is not the same as growth. While Aurora, Monogram, Revell, and AMT built increasingly detailed plastic model empires through the 1960s and into the 1970s, Comet's catalog remained anchored to the product category it had pioneered in 1929, a category that a shrinking, aging slice of the hobby market still wanted, and that fewer new customers walked into a hobby shop looking for. By 1983, company records show a transformation in name, if not fully in spirit. Comet had become Comet model hobby craft, and later still, Comet Industries Corporation, the kind of corporate rebranding that often signals new ownership, restructured debt, or both. Production levels, by every account from the period, continued to shrink. There was no single villain left to blame by this point. No conglomerate acquirer stripped the brand for parts. No foreign competitor undercut Comet on price in some final decisive battle. The competitors that mattered, Aurora, Monogram, the plastic kit era Comet had walked away from in the 1950s, had already won that fight decades earlier, quietly, without anyone at Comet needing to lose a headline-making battle to them. What remained by the 1980s was simply Erosion, a company running on inertia, on a loyal but aging customer base, on a name that still meant something to men who were now well into middle age and increasingly little to their sons. The end, when it finally came, arrived with almost no ceremony at all. In 1998, a company called Guillaume, itself a long-time rival in the Balsa model kit business, acquired Comet Industries, along with a related operation called North Pacific, out of Chicago. It was, by the standards of American manufacturing collapses. An unremarkable transaction. No court filings made headlines. No local newspaper ran a story about the end of an era. A hobby industry that had once filled model airplane news with full-page Comet advertisements barely registered the sale at all. That is, in its own way, the most telling detail of the entire story. Comet did not go out the way Aurora did. Or the way so many of the brands this channel has documented did. With a dramatic collapse, a padlocked gate, a final shift walking out into a parking lot for the last time, Comet went out the way a name fades from a business card. Quietly. Administratively. Almost apologetically. Sixty-nine years earlier, two teenagers with five dollars had built something that Time magazine wrote about. That boys across America saved their allowance for. That trained a generation of engineers who would go on to shape the entire American plastic model kit industry. By 1998, that same company existed only as a line item in an acquisition filing. The molds were gone by then. Decades gone. Sold to Aurora back in the 1950s. The founders were gone too. Their five dollar company long since passed through other hands. The factory on Cermak Road, on 29th Street, on 35th Street. Scattered addresses in a story that moved more than it stayed still. The name survived. Guido kept it technically folded into a larger catalog. But the company that trained Robert Reeder was already gone. The company that gave Carl Goldberg his first professional break was already gone. What Guido purchased in 1998 was a name, not a company. The company had disappeared years, maybe decades, before the paperwork caught up. The address at 501 West 35th Street in Chicago no longer carries the Comet name. Records don't confirm exactly what stands there and this channel won't guess. What can be said is this: The company that once employed 300 people building model airplanes now exists nowhere on that street. The Comet name did survive, in a limited way. Gillow, the company that acquired it in 1998, continues to produce balsa wood flying model kits under multiple brand names, including reissues that carry Comet's original designs. A modern hobbyist can still, in theory, buy a version of a kit Bill Bishop's company once sold for a dime. What they cannot buy is the company that made it. The drafting room, where six draftsmen and eight designers once worked. The factory floor where Robert Reeder learned his trade. The culture that turned $5 into 10 million kits a year. The molds tell a stranger story. The plastic tooling Comet sold off in the 1950s didn't disappear either. It kept building airplanes for Aurora for years afterward under a different company's name, generating profit for a competitor Comet had in its own way helped train and equip. Today, original Comet kits circulate through a small but devoted collector community. Unbuilt examples of the classic wooden tissue models, a Grumman Gulf Hawk, a Piper Cub Cruiser, one of Carl Goldberg's zipper kits from 1940, sell through specialty dealers and estate sales for anywhere from $30 to well over $100, depending on condition and rarity. The buyers are rarely children. They're men in their 60s and 70s, many of them building, for the first time in decades, the exact kit their father once helped them assemble at a kitchen table. Here is the detail that reframes everything else in this story. Robert Reeder, the young man who spent 1931 cutting balsa parts on Comet's factory floor, didn't simply leave to build a rival company. He carried Comet's founding lesson with him, that a hobby built on craftsmanship and precision could also be built at a price ordinary families could afford. Monogram, the company he helped found, would spend the next several decades putting that same philosophy into plastic, on a scale Comet itself never achieved. In a very real sense, Comet's most lasting legacy wasn't a kid at all. It was a former employee who took what he learned on Cermac Road and built something bigger with it for a different company's name. What Comet's story ultimately shows is not simply the failure of one manufacturer to keep pace with plastic. It shows how an entire company's expertise, its trained engineers, its tooling, its market position, can outlive the business that created it. Scattered across the industry it once dominated, doing the same work under different letterhead. Comet didn't just lose the American model kit business. In pieces, through the people and the molds it let go, it helped build the companies that replaced it. Somewhere tonight, in a workshop in Ohio or a spare bedroom in Arizona, someone is carefully cutting a rubber-powered wing spar from a sheet of Comet Printwood, found at an estate sale, following instructions drafted by Vito Garofalo more than 60 years ago, building a plane that still flies exactly the way it did the day it left that factory on Cermac Road. See you in the next one.