A recently published survey states today’s youth spend 7½ hours per day on

some type of digital media.

Seventy-two year-old Oregon resident Ernest Zam says he didn’t have cell phones to text on or X-Box to play with when he was young. His recalls his family not even getting a television until the 1950s.

Instead, Zam spent his youth listening to radio shows like Batman. He also got into constructing scale models and remains involved today.

“I can’t begin to think how many I’ve built over the years, but personally I’ve built primarily my own. I have built several airplanes for other people,” Zam said.

Zam got involved as an adult with radio-controlled model airplanes in 1974 and today is a member of the Recker RC radio-controlled flying club, which meets on Fostoria Road.

He says he even was once interested in getting involved with model railroading, but it didn’t stick. Now he’s created something that astonishes not only himself, but also his 70-year-old wife, Carol.

Ernie, as he likes to be called, built a radio-controlled model of a 26-foot Lyman cruising boat that he once owned. It wasn’t easy, he says, and this model did not come from a kit.

After he completed the Lyman, a man contacted him offering to purchase it. But the boat is, how do you say, priceless, to Zam.

“I said, ‘How can I sell it?’ It would be like five cents an hour for my time I put into it,” Zam said.

It took Zam 13 months to construct the Lyman, which is scaled at 1¼ inches to one foot. The only thing not exactly replicated is the serial number — instead he put the date he finished the model along with his wife’s initials. He finished it last August.

The Zams, who are Birmingham (East Toledo) natives with Hungarian and Polish heritage, have memories from the real Lyman they owned. However, Ernie had to construct the model from memory and the latest photographs, taken in April 2003 before the real Lyman was sold.

“It is completely scratch built. I mean, completely,” Ernie said. “I took about maybe 20 or 30 photographs, and I maybe should have taken 120 or 130 photographs. That’s the way it is.”

Zam put the model Lyman on a friend’s pond off Pemberville Road, and photos of the radio-controlled boat patrolling the water look too much like a real boat in the lake.

“If you’d see this thing, this is not a piece of crap really. I’m not bragging or anything, but you’ve got to see it to believe it,” Ernie, who is nicknamed “E-Z” at the flying club, said.

Obsessed and “Insane”
Ernie says his wife would jokingly nickname the model Lyman “Insane” while he was obsessed with its construction. He understands how she felt.

“Believe me, within the year I was ready to walk away from it a number of times and run it through the band saw. It’s pretty frustrating,” Ernie said.

Real Lyman boats were constructed in Sandusky primarily for Lake Erie. The Lyman Brothers boat company was founded by Bernard and Herman Lyman in Cleveland around 1875. By 1980, Lyman had ceased new boat production entirely, and now the real thing is a collector’s item.

“It was a good Lake Erie boat,” Zam said. “I’ve always wanted to build this model of the boat I owned, and I’ve done that. I got a lot of nice comments from the people that have seen it, including the guys that I fly with. It pretty much looks like the real thing, really.”

To find parts, Zam spent hours searching the internet. Most of what he found was the wrong size, wrong material, or too pricy. He operated a machine shop 39 years before retiring, so he knew what he was looking for.

“I kind of knew what the materials were and I didn’t have a problem obtaining those materials because I’ve been into airplanes so many years I knew where to buy a lot of this stuff.”

Zam has built three other radio-controlled boats to go along with countless airplanes.

A number of years back, he finished construction of a model Coast Guard boat; a plastic model PT 109 boat replicating the one the late-President John Kennedy served on during World War II; and a 13-foot Lyman row built that replicates one made when Lyman started in business in the late 1800s.

The Coast Guard and PT 109 boats were from kits. He finished the rowboat, which was Lyman’s forerunner to all of its other boats, four years ago, and like his latest Lyman it is handmade from scratch.

“Anything you see on this last Lyman boat I built, I mean everything, I built — even the hardware. I made all the hardware out of brass and I had it all chrome-plated. Everything is handmade,” Zam said.

Zam showed his Lyman at a Toledo Municipal Marina boat show off Front Street, and will show it again at a radio-controlled national conference held each year in April at SeaGate Convention Centre. It got quite a few looks at the marina, where there were also real collectible Lymans on display at the docks.

“It really makes me feel good when they all enjoy it,” Zam said.

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