Now that Butch is gone, I will speak frankly about him. I knew him for the better part of twenty years, and he loved trains as much as I do. “Butch” wasn’t his actual name, but I’m not here to praise him, so I’ll give him a pseudonym. Any of my clubmates reading this will know who I’m talking about, anyway. That’s fine. They’ve already heard my rants. They remember the stories.

1.

Butch was a stalwart of my N scale club long before I joined. I met him on a cold April morning in 2003, at the Batavia show. After a hiatus from the hobby, I’d joined up with the local group of S gaugers, and we were set to exhibit a modular layout at the show. I had two totes of American Flyer trains, and my six-year-old son, with me. Alas, that was the morning after the ice storm, and there were downed trees and power lines to contend with, so the S gauge club cancelled. I didn’t get word until after I arrived.

Instead, my son and I hung out with the N scale club for the day. Butch had a cadre of N scalers operating a 2 x 8-foot portable layout. We struck up a conversation, he let my son try his hand at the throttle, and I marveled at how much more smoothly N scale trains ran than they did in the ’80s. He invited me to drop by the club’s space at the mall, where they met weekly. I started making regular visits, and within a few months, I’d signed up, and started work on an N scale layout of my own.

2.

The club has four officer positions: superintendent, secretary, treasurer, and the office Butch held, chief engineer. As defined in the bylaws, the chief engineer held sway over technical matters only, but Butch made the job his own. For all practical purposes, he ran the club. We exhibited at the shows he wanted us to exhibit at, met when he wanted us to meet, and worked on the projects he advocated. (To be fair, Butch did a lot of the work, too.) It sounds autocratic, and it was, but you have to bear in mind that this is a hobby club. Most of us just wanted to run trains, and were happy to have Butch do the thinking for us. For a while, anyways.

Then along the Great Train Extravaganza. The mall had just changed ownership, and the new owner was trying hard to attract shoppers. Butch pitched the idea of multiple train exhibits throughout the mall over Thanksgiving weekend. When he brought it up with us in early September, he was vague on specifics, but assured us that he’d share his plan soon. It sounded like a great idea. I was still participating in the S gauge group, and with my assistance, he brought them onboard for the show as well.

September went by. October went by. We didn’t hear any further details from Butch. Finally, two weeks before Thanksgiving, he announced the schedule. Twenty-eight hours of operating time, spread over three days. Suddenly, it was clear to my S gauge friends that we were going to be stretched extremely thin, but we felt committed. Butch assured us that some N scalers would provide additional manpower to help keep the S gauge layout operational.

So, the situation Friday morning: The N scale club (membership of about 25, with widely varying levels of participation) has thrown up the gate on its storefront, where a large Ntrak layout is displayed. Two smaller N scale layouts have been moved to a site on the mall concourse. The S gauge club, composed of six members, is setting up its own modular layout on yet another concourse site. Each location ought to have at least two people at all times, over three long days, on a holiday weekend. I had committed to helping both clubs as best I could.

By the time I realized the extent of the problem, it was too late. So, I carried on as best I could, for as long as I could. At the end of each day, anything of value—electrical gear, rolling stock, and the like—was to be removed from the concourse layouts, and either taken home, or locked up in the storefront. The S gaugers who closed up on Friday weren’t coming back Saturday, so they planned to stash things in the storefront, where I could retrieve them in the morning.

When they got to the storefront, however, it was locked up and dark. Butch had gone home without even checking on them. One of the S gaugers, Chuck, loaded the gear into his car and took it home. I had to make the long snowy drive out to Chuck’s the next morning to get it all, then head for the mall to tend the layout solo.

When I confronted Butch with the discrepancies between his promises and his actions, he was unrepentant. Frustrated, we broke down the S gauge layout Saturday afternoon, a day early, and hauled it out. On Sunday, I could have made myself useful tending an N scale layout, but I stayed away. Instead, I listened to my wife lecture about how holidays are for family, and was in no mood to protest. I felt like a complete idiot for getting my S gauge friends entangled in the whole affair.

I wasn’t the only one frustrated by Butch’s overcommitment and poor planning. It was a commonly expressed complaint at the next club meeting. Everybody agreed that such a fiasco shouldn’t be allowed to happen again. Everybody, that is, except Butch.

At that point, I saw only two options: quit the club, or run for Butch’s office.

3.

Over the next several months, I dialed back on my club involvement, and remained extremely wary of making any more commitments to Butch’s proposals. I participated with the club at some of the spring shows, and spent others with the S gaugers, or exhibiting my layout as an individual. In March, the designated nominations person came around, soliciting candidates for the club election.

“I’d like to run for chief engineer,” I said.

“You’d be well qualified,” he replied. I interpreted that as less a compliment of my talents than an indictment of Butch’s leadership style, but he didn’t elaborate further.

The Batavia show was two days before the election. I had my own layout to exhibit that day, under my own banner, just down the aisle from the club’s layout. Butch came over, made a hasty compliment about the progress I’d made on my layout, then got right down to business. He wanted me to run for superintendent, instead of chief engineer.

“I can work with you,” he said, in a manner strongly implying that Rick, our superintendent, was the real problem. I can’t remember exactly what my reply was, but I certainly didn’t return his sentiment.

The election-night meeting drew better turnout than a typical club meeting. One member was out of town for work, but he phoned in to cast his vote verbally. When everything was counted, I won, by one vote.

4.

Butch’s duties as chief engineer were formally handed over to me at the next month’s meeting. At that point, he still had enough goodwill among the membership that a proposal to create a fifth officer position, just for him, was seriously discussed. It would have peeled off some chief engineer duties, mainly involving shows. I was willing to go along with it, but Butch wasn’t. Suddenly, the man who had been everywhere, all the time, was nowhere. He didn’t set foot in the club’s mall space for two years. The proposal was shelved and forgotten.

Meanwhile, questions were being asked about the whereabouts of club equipment that nobody had seen for a while. Suspicion grew that Butch had held onto a number of items, but nobody had proof. On those rare occasions when somebody plucked up the courage to ask, Butch had only vague answers. “Butch’s basement” became a running gag whenever the topic of missing gear came up. You could have filled half a warehouse with all the things we imagined were there.

Late in Butch’s tenure, the club had rented an empty classroom in a vacant Catholic school. We all knew the mall’s days were numbered. Some of the club’s excess Ntrak modules, and one of the portable layouts, were moved there. The school happened to be convenient to Butch’s home. He had the only key, which, after the election, he never seemed to have with him. Butch did show up at the club’s annual picnic, where he announced that the club would be running trains at the school every day for the parish’s Bible camp that week. No officers were consulted for this, no discussion was held. Butch just decided, like before.

I went to the school promptly Monday afternoon, to find Butch and his wife running trains there, and demanded the key. He objected. He hemmed and hawed. He protested the ruin of the club’s supposedly agreed-upon plan. He pleaded on behalf of the good children who had been looking forward to trains that week. I held my hand out, and reminded him that I was an elected club officer, and that he was not, and that a refusal to comply would jeopardize his good standing. Reluctantly, he handed over the key.

To this day, it still feels like the bravest act I’ve ever performed on behalf of the hobby.

5.

A couple of years after that, we did get evicted from the mall, and the classroom became our only space. Butch didn’t assist with moving all the modules, equipment, supplies, and detritus. Nobody expected him to. It was clear to everybody that his health was slipping. He was in no condition for a flight of stairs, let alone heavy lifting. He did, however, show up at the next meeting to complain about how the move had been performed. He was particularly critical of some choices we’d made about what things we chose to store, and where.

I could only bite my tongue for so long. “Where do you think we should have put those things, Butch?” I asked. “Your basement?”

There was one burst of laughter, quickly stifled, from the membership. The conversation didn’t last for long after that.

Once Butch started showing up to meetings again, his last-minute proposals for exhibitions returned with him. He was trying hard to get us into places a train club had no business going to—big-box stores, town parades, car shows. Everybody remembered his penchant for Tuesday-night announcements of urgent gigs he wanted to set up on Friday. People had gotten burned out on that kind of frantic scrambling back in the day, and no one had patience for it anymore.

At one meeting he did not attend, a motion was made that required 30 days’ notice on any proposed event. It was rapidly seconded, unanimously carried, and never invoked for anybody but Butch. The 30-Day Rule became the blunderbuss we used to shoot down his proposals, but that didn’t stop him from sending them up like skeet every chance he could.

6.

I served as chief engineer for four years, took a year off, then ran for superintendent. When I ran, I made it clear to Rick, who still held that office, that it was not against him. There was no need to remind him of my reason to run for chief engineer. He ran for secretary instead, and relished the task of keeping me focused at meetings. (Four years later, when I stepped back, Rick became superintendent again.)

Butch ran again for chief engineer, unopposed, and once more secured the job, but by then, everything had changed. The goodwill that enabled his old iron-fist style had long since drained away, and the group had no desire to do his bidding unquestioningly. His last term was mostly quiet, and he surrendered the office as soon as somebody else expressed an interest in it. Questions remained about missing club property, but we concluded that whatever items he may have had were of little use to the club anymore, and the matter was dropped.

He did have some club-owned Ntrak modules, one of which he had volunteered to work on. Every month, we asked for a progress report. Every month, he claimed he’d be working in it again soon, once the weather warmed up, or cooled off, or the garage got cleaned up. Every month, we’d silently disbelieve him.

7.

Eventually, we decided that it was finally time to reclaim the club’s modules. After much stalling on Butch’s part, a day was agreed upon, and a small party of volunteers—some long-timers who were on relatively friendly terms with him—took a van to his place. They found the garage in an advanced state of disrepair, and a number of unsettling things around the house as well. It was clear that Butch and his wife were struggling to cope. After extracting and loading the modules, they performed a few needed chores for him, and reported back to us. What they described was so troubling that even I, who had long since run out of patience with Butch’s antics, took pity. Soon afterward, we granted him free lifetime membership, and gifted him the same portable layout he was running when I first met him.

Butch is gone now. I have Butch to thank for getting me back into N scale, and into the club. I have him to blame for nearly driving me out of it. He helped build the club, and he nearly destroyed it, too. He was a source of grief, and amusement, for many years. It was a very complicated dynamic.