Like so many members of the Greatest Generation, my father, former Staff Sergeant John Robinson, rarely spoke about the War. He was on Iwo Jima during the famous flag raising, but the topic never came up at the dinner table. It was only recently, when he wrote a brief memoir, that we learned of his role in a secret "Beach Jumper" operation. His mission was to trick the enemy by broadcasting the pre-recorded sounds of a mock landing force on giant speakers. He then worked with a team of scientists and engineers at Duke University, perfecting a system for triangulating the position of enemy artillery using the sound from strategically placed microphones. He tested the equipment in Hawaii and deployed it successfully during the counter attack on Japan. You didn’t see that in Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima movie.

My father and I were both sickly kids. He suffered from severe asthma, pneumonia, scarlet fever, and persistent allergies so bad that he left the family farm at age four, and never went back. His grandparents nursed him through his teens. I too spent much of my childhood gasping for air, then was laid out with rheumatic fever. And like my father, I passed the isolated months in bed, building models from kits. I made mostly plastic cars and monsters. My father made airplanes out of wood.

One of the photos in my father’s hand-made memoir shows a sleek 1930s era airplane model made of balsa floating on pontoons. The picture hung over his workshop for decades. The "Comet Zipper" was special. It was his first motorized model. Before that, isolated and often bedridden, he made only airplanes powered by rubber bands.

It took almost a year, but I finally found a duplicate Comet Zipper model on eBay. It arrived in cherry condition, still in its original cardboard box with fold-out paper instructions to assemble the plane with its 54-inch wingspan. The kit originally sold for $4.50, not including the large bore gas engine. My father built his first Comet Zipper at age 16. He built the second one in his early 80s. I wondered if duplicating the experience might conjure up more memories of the past – of a time before war, before family, before career.

"Everything about the model was the same," my father told me recently. "Making it was very nostalgic."

There is an evolving marketplace, he says, for hobbyists who want to build "antique" models. You can even get reproduction kits these days, but this one was real, almost as old as the man who assembled it. No plastic. No twist-off pre-made parts. Constructing the body and wings and gluing on the paper skin took a month. Teenagers in the 1930s had to carve the airplane wheels out of a solid block of balsa. They had to be skilled and resourceful. You didn’t just assemble the parts, you crafted them.

My father explained how, as a teenager, he bartered with the shopkeeper for the $20 gas engine by building a dozen smaller demonstration models for the store. He got the rest of his money manning a stand selling fresh corn at Cape Cod during summers. He and his grandparents lived by the water in a bare wooden cottage from April to October every year. The salt air soothed his allergies and "recharged the batteries" of his ailing grandfather.

That connection to the sea, passed on from generation to generation, is deeply embedded in me. For the last four decades I’ve rarely been more than a few miles from the ocean.

CONTINUE Comet Zipperstory