A lifetime of delivering the rail
Mesquite: Her businesses kept model train lovers chug-chugging along
12:00 AM CST on Saturday, February 25, 2006By KARIN SHAW ANDERSON / The Dallas Morning News Maybe it was premonition that left Bobbye Hall spellbound by the sight of a locomotive.
NAN COULTER/Special Contributor Bobbye Hall, 96, closed her hobby shop in Old East Dallas in 2001 before selling her model line. A trailblazer among women in the industry, Mrs. Hall has written an autobiography that covers her career, travels and adventures. "I remember my grandmother would come to visit us on the train," the woman said recently from her Mesquite living room. "I can remember the big black engine and the whistle and the smoke. I was just fascinated by it when I was a child." Still, Mrs. Hall never planned to sell railroad replicas to others smitten with a bygone era. But by the time she closed her hobby shop in Old East Dallas in 2001 and soon afterward sold Hallmark Models a line of valuable brass scale models she founded in the 1960s she had spent more than half of her 96 years dedicated to the model railroad business. "It was back in 1946 when I joined the industry, and it was a man's world," Mrs. Hall remembered. "Several people had wanted me to write a book, because I was the first woman on the board of directors of the hobby industry. ... I was the first in several things." She obliged, and her recollections are bound together in a book slated for release next month. Mrs. Hall expects the autobiography, which touches on her travels and adventures as well as her career, to be sold at trade shows and hobbyist conventions. "I've had a fairly interesting life," Mrs. Hall said. She's been amused by shop customers and foreign customs, and watched tragedy turn around: Her 14-year-old great-niece was kidnapped in the
1970s by a murder suspect demanding a ransom. The girl was reunited with family members three days later. Mrs. Hall's only child died shortly after birth, but she never felt lonely. "That's the nice thing about being in the hobby shop business," she said. "I had lots of children, and I watched them grow up." She fondly remembers one young customer's Christmas gift to his mother in the 1950s. "We had a youngster whose parents had given him a ... train, just a circle of track," she recalled. "His father gave him money to buy his mother a Christmas present, and he bought her a pair of [track] switches. "We never let him forget it," she said with a chuckle. Mrs. Hall often traveled by rail during her excursions abroad. She has ridden the Orient Express and other storied lines. "The old mahogany and rosewood, you just wanted to caress it, it was so beautiful," she said. For her 96th birthday in September, Mrs. Hall's nephew rented a McKinney Avenue streetcar that is a few years older than his aunt. "Her name is Rosie, and ... we had an hour of fun," Mrs. Hall said. But she is also keen on other modes of transportation. "I've been around the world twice," Mrs. Hall said. "I've ridden the Concorde twice, and I've ridden in an air balloon over the south of France." After starting her own line of model trains, Mrs. Hall frequently visited Asia, where the miniatures were manufactured with exacting details. She remembers a trip to a silk factory in Korea with the wife of one of her manufacturers. Neither woman spoke the other's language. "I thought she wanted me to help pick out a piece of silk for her, so I picked out one," Mrs. Hall said. "The next morning, they sent me a Korean costume. It was beautiful. They had worked overnight on it. "They gave you fantastic presents," she said. "You had to be careful about looking at anything while you were out, because they would buy it for you." She once witnessed kindness from an elephant while riding the animal on a safari. "I took a Polaroid, and the wind blew it down," she said. "The elephant took its snout and picked it up and handed it back." If her stories seem too fantastic for truth, Mrs. Hall said not to worry her publisher has verified all the facts. "I wrote all the notes, and he's double-checked everything," Mrs. Hall said. "We're not going to have a problem like this man," she said, referring to author James Frey, who recently admitted fabricating parts of a book. "I wonder why he exaggerated. ... You just tell it like it is." E-mail snipped-for-privacy@dallasnews.com