Wayne Moyer, writer/builder (1941-2018)
Wayne was born in a small Ohio town in 1941 and began building model airplanes as soon as he was allowed to hold a single-edge razor blade: X-Acto knives hadn’t been invented yet! With the advent of plastic model kits he branched out into car and ship models as well.
After graduating from the University of Cincinnati as an AeroSpace Engineer in 1964, Wayne began a 37-year career as a Conceptual Design Engineer at Wright-Patterson AFB and participated in the preliminary design of most current USAF systems, retiring after serving as Lead Engineer for the ATF (now F-22) Conceptual Design/Evaluation Phase.
Wayne wrote his first model story (on Ford GT’s, a continuing interest) in the Fall of 1972 and became a reviewer by accident; John Day liked a story he wrote about Day’s second 1/43 scale kit and sent him a box of kits with the request “do it again, please”. Since then he’s written somewhere around 2000 stories (“1778 that I’ve been paid for at this point and 200-300 more for club publications or magazines that went out of business owing me money”) for at least 43 different model, aviation, automobile, and racing magazines. From 1983 to 1994 he was a weekend photojournalist covering NASCAR, Indy car, IMSA, SVRA, and SCCA races and provided photo documentation to several 1/43 scale model manufacturers.
A private pilot since 1969, Wayne’s biggest kit project to date has been building a Van’s RV-12 two seat airplane, making its first flight in September 2010. Wayne and his wife Kay have four daughters and eight grandchildren, none of whom share his interest in model building.
Sadly, Wayne passed away in April of 2018, surrounded by his family and friends. You will be missed, Wayne! Thank you for sharing your incredible knowledge of our hobby, and opening up your home, and life, to us. Gregg…
