Eat, sleep and breathe history
Retired mechanic’s bed and breakfast transports its guests back in time
Heard the wartime tale of Canadian fighter pilot Roy Brown who shot down Germany’s notorious Red Baron over France 100 years ago? Probably not the way Ian Baron recounts it.
The military history buff’s show-andtell version involves empty apple juice tins, a cedar fence post and the walls of seven above-ground swimming pools.
That’s some of the old junk Baron used to build full-size replicas of Brown’s 1916 Sopwith Camel and the Red Baron’s1918 Fokker DR1.
The two warplanes, along with an assortment of Second World War vehicles, a German U-boat and restored Model A Fords, occupy places of honour on the retired mechanic’s 4.5-hectare rural property in Clarington, an hour northeast of Toronto.
A whiz with a welding torch, he’s the ultimate upcycler, transforming trash into treasured icons that transport visitors back through time.
Cecile Bowers, a history lover and 44year member of the Bowmanville Legion, marvels over Baron’s unique craft.
“It amazes me what he makes out of these odd things that people just throw away,” she says after a tour that also touched a nerve.
“It made me think about my dad, whose face was badly injured by shrapnel in the war,” she says, tearing up.
If he hadn’t been leaning back in his jeep carrier, reading a letter from her mother, he would have been killed, Bowers says.
Baron’s hobby started a dozen years ago, holed up in his tidy workshop for nine months building his first replica airplane — an all-consuming project that turned his wife, Luverne, into a “Sopwith widow,” she jokes.
But his passion prevailed as he churned out realistic-looking lawn art that stopped motorists in their tracks.
“We were getting swamped,” Baron says. “People would just drive in and show themselves around, thinking it was a public park.” Guests of Model A Acres Bed & Breakfast, which Luverne runs in their Tudor-style home, were likewise captivated. So Baron, who had retired from the Darlington nuclear power plant, started doing guided walks by appointment for tourists from across Canada, the U.S., Europe and the Philippines. A pilot from Dubai has been there four or five times.
With global acclaim for Baron’s handiwork taking off, Toronto author Ron Brown added Model A Acres to his 2016 edition of Top 150 Unusual Things to See in Ontario.
Everyone has a story or information to share, observes Baron, citing connections that continue to surface.
“It is surprising how many people relate to this as they make comments such as ‘My dad worked on the Avro Arrow or worked on the Mosquito,’ ” he says.
Work is underway on his sixth warbird, a de Havilland Mosquito whose skeleton encompasses a 16.5-metre wingspan. More than 100 companies in southern Ontario made parts for the Second World War’s fastest plane, according to Baron.
Bowmanville resident Paul Scattergood has firsthand knowledge about the aircraft. “My dad worked on Mosquito bomber fuselages at GM in Oshawa,” Scattergood says during a recent visit.
Spectators gape as Baron shows how the crew squeezed into the plane through a small door on the side.
“If you made a wrong turn, you walked into 12 feet of propeller,” he tells them during an hour-long tour peppered with anecdotes and humour.
Pilot Roy Brown, he notes, was involved with Camp X, a secret Whitby training school for spies. Baron explains how he recreated Brown’s Sopwith by carving a propeller out of a fence post and using juice tins as stand-ins for the nine-engine cylinders. Swimming pools — 37 so far — are his go-to source of sheet metal for the skin of aircraft and other vehicles.
Much of the detritus comes from junkyards and scrap heaps, but Baron sometimes has to buy new electrical conduit for framing. He uses a 1 to 48 scale model to calculate lifesize dimensions of each part.
“One hundred per cent recy- cled!” the do-it-yourselfer declares about the latest addition, a 1911 Pacific-type locomotive whose repurposed parts include playground slides, the chassis of a 1950 Ford gravel truck and a fire extinguisher turned train whistle.
“Canada Post has been very good to me,” Baron says, pointing out cast-off equipment such as mailbag carts that became handrails.
Other recycled parts bear a suspicious resemblance to charcoal barbecue lids, clothes washer drums, even bowling pins — donated by an Oshawa bowling alley for periscope tops on the U-boat in his pond.
No detail has been overlooked in his collection of planes, train and automobiles. The uniformed mannequin at the controls of a 1944 Messerschmitt 109G, for example, sucks on what used to be a piece of mop handle.
“He was known to smoke cigars, so I gave him one,” the crafter says of German flying ace Adolf Galland.
Among the enthusiasts soaking up Baron’s brand of histor- ical storytelling was a representative from nearby Camp 30 for German prisoners of war, which also offers guided tours.
“My interest (in history) is anything and everything,” explains Bernice Norton of the Clarington branch of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario.
Baron tips his hat to Tom Dietrich and Bob Revell of the Tiger Boys Aircraft Museum in Guelph for pitching in with parts and advice, and “twisting my arm” — he confesses — to build the Mosquito.