Edgar William Seay

Edgar William Seay, son of Lulu Fay Brown and Edgar Gardner Seay, was born 15 November 1909 in Vandervoort, Polk County, AR. The family home had only recently come to be in Vandervoort, a situation that had arisen when his Methodist “circuit preacher” father had been assigned as a deacon there. Otherwise home could still be said to be DeQueen, Sevier County, AR, where his mother and her family had lived since 1898.

Edgar eventually became an older brother to two sisters, but this includes Margaret Seay, who survived less than one month after her birth in mid-1911, while the family was based in Foreman, Little River County, AR. His other sister, with whom he grew up, was Mary Juanita Seay, born in the spring of 1913 while the family was residing in Texarkana, Miller County, AR.

Shortly before Mary’s birth, Edgar Gardner Seay caught polio. He managed to survive the initial onset but his health was severely compromised. He survived only until December, 1914. Young Edgar was barely five years old at the time of his father’s death. His mother forged on without remarrying, so for the rest of his childhood the immediate family consisted of just himself, his mother, and his little sister.

At first, the family home was back in DeQueen, where Lulu could count on the support and companionship of her mother and her sisters Ethel and Ada. But within a few years the Seays moved to Arkadelphia, Clark County, AR. It was there that Edgar spent much of his later childhood and his adolescence. His mother supported them all as a florist.

The 1910s and early 1920s was an era when the airplane was exotic and new and the subject of the fascination of boys all across the country. No boy could have been more enthusiastic than Edgar. It was more than a matter of fantasies of flying one or going off to have adventures as a pilot. Edgar had an engineering bent. He memorized what kind of engines each type of aircraft had, the horsepower ratings, the type and proportions of the metals and wood and fabric that went into their manufacture. He plunged into the hobby of building model aircraft. This pursuit would go on to shape his destiny.

Edgar always vividly recalled the first time he was able to see and touch an actual airplane. It occurred one Sunday morning during the World War I years, when he was eight or nine years old. A military pilot was out in his Curtiss Jenny and decided to land it in a hayfield south of Arkadelphia in the hope of drawing the attention of a local girl he fancied. What it did was attract young Edgar and one of his buddies, who skipped church services and Sunday school -- at the risk of his mother’s outrage -- so as to scamper out to the field to get a close-up look. Edgar pestered the pilot with a flood of technical questions about the Curtiss Jenny until the flustered fellow proclaimed, “Son, I don’t know. I just fly the damn thing.”

By the time Edgar was a teenager, he was no longer content to simply assemble model planes from kits made by commercial model companies. He began constructing parts from scratch and if need be, he fashioned features or added embellishments to make his models resemble the full-sized versions better than could be done by mundanely depending on whatever materials and instructions the manufacturers put in the kits. His results began reaching a level that deserved to be called professional -- if only there were a profession such as building model planes. For Edgar, there would be such a profession in the future. The first glimmer of that development began in 1927, when he was seventeen years old. After years of spending money to pursue his hobby, he began making money. In 1927, the Seays were living in Little Rock, Pulaski County, AR. Charles Lindburgh had just made his famous solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Edgar bought three Spirit of St. Louis kits from the Ideal Airplane Company (later to be the Ideal Toy Company) of New York and his exceptional work assembling them led to the sale of one of the trio for display in Pheiffer’s Department Store, one of the retail businesses that was taking steps to prepare for Little Rock to host a stop of the Lindburgh celebration tour.

The precedent had been set. Edgar’s reputation continued to grow. More sales followed, not just of finished pieces but commissions. At this point it was a pipe dream to expect that he might be able to depend on income from model airplane activity as a means of subsistence, so Edgar did the practical thing and became employed in the “real” aviation industry. He got a wood-working job at Command Air, a company near the Little Rock airport. His task was to build ribs for the fuselages. On his own time, he made model aircraft, finding a natural customer base among the other employees of the firm. His first day of work was 1 August 1928. Fifteen months later, like so many other Americans, he was out of a job due to the stock market crash. Command Air suddenly found itself without any customers with the funds to buy their merchandise, and so the owners closed up shop. But during those fifteen months, Edgar and his colleagues had built four hundred airplanes -- airplanes as in the full-sized, carry-people-through-the-sky kind.

A watershed moment occurred in 1932 when Edgar attended the Air Show in Detroit, MI. By the end of the ten-day event, Edgar had collected 432 orders for model airplanes. A friend helped garner further sales for a commission, allowing Edgar to concentrate on construction and order fulfillment. From that point on, he knew he could count on making money from his model-plane artistry. As the Great Depression eased he would reestablish his day job and therefore did not have to depend on this “hobby gone viral,” but as far as he was concerned, he was now too successful and too engaged in it to ever give it up.

Not all of the customers were hobbyists. Many were owners of actual full-sized aircraft who were delighted by the idea of being able to purchase a model version of the same plane they owned and flew to display at their homes or offices, and were willing to pay premium rates to have a showcase-caliber item. In time, Edgar’s renown was such that some hobbyists began collecting runs of his output. (At this point, four or five near-complete collections are believed to exist in various hands throughout the nation.)

Meanwhile his full-scale aviation career led Edgar to settle in Dallas in the mid-1930s. He would be based there and in the suburb of Irving for the rest of his long life. His career lasted half a century. Naturally helping build planes during World War II was one of the accomplishments he took pride in. Over the decades he also instructed at Dallas Aviation School, inspected for the Civil Aeronautics Administration, and built F-8 Crusaders at Chance Vought.

Not long after becoming established in Dallas, Edgar got to know Mildred Lucille Taylor. Mildred, born 12 September 1911 in Thornton, Limestone County, TX, was a daughter of Edgar Elmer Taylor and Selma Francis Rader. She and Edgar were married in Dallas 17 December 1938. They produced one child, a son, in the early 1940s. (Edgar and Mildred and their son are shown above in a photo from later in the 1940s.)

In 1945, with the war no longer causing him to have to put in extra hours at the day job, Edgar developed his model-airplane involvement into a genuine business, and created Model Aircraft Laboratories. In 1948, he took a further step in support of this venture and founded an actual, physical shop in Irving. This he named M.A.L. Hobby Shop. He and Mildred and their son moved into quarters in the back and that continued to make that their place of residence until 1965. The shop was a family operation with all three members of the household participating, though of course the young Mr. Seay would have to grow into his role. (He would eventually take over as main proprietor in his turn.) The shop sold a variety of collectible items, not just model airplane kits. For example, one of Edgar’s son’s passions was comic books, and a section of the store was created to serve clientele with that particular interest.

Eventually Edgar retired from his formal career, but his day-to-day involvement in M.A.L. Hobby shop did not cease until he reached his late nineties and finally became more-or-less house-bound. Customers were wistful after so many years to find him no longer there behind the counter to greet them. However, even in that twilight of his time on Earth, Edgar was able to enjoy knowing the business was going strong, in part because the mail-order aspect had always been essential and the transition to garnering customer orders by means of the internet was a natural sort of evolution.

As a legend in the field of model aircraft kit production, Edgar was featured in the newspaper articles, on local radio, and in nation-wide newsletters and web-based publications. He was so well-regarded, and the shop was such a distinctive aspect of Irving, that the local historical society erected a marker outside the store the year after Edgar’s death. (A great deal of material about his work, as well as about Edgar himself, was featured on M.A.L. Hobby’s own company website during his last years, and continued to be there for seven to eight years after he was gone.)

Mildred passed away 11 January 1994 in Irving. Her remains were buried in Cobb Cemetery in Thornton in a section containing graves of various Taylor-Rader relatives. This ultimately would be Edgar’s resting place as well, but he did not join her for quite some time. From 2002 until his death, Edgar held the distinction of being the eldest surviving descendant of Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader. He reached the age of one hundred before finally perishing 20 July 2010 in the early morning hours. Graveside funeral services were held at Cobb Cemetery on the 24th, Reverend Curtis Morton officiating.

Descendants of Edgar William Seay with Mildred Lucille Taylor

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