I used to make models, but I don’t recall having this stuff around. Here’s the straight dope on this stuff from a random model website…
N: Mills Testor was from Rockwood, IL. That’s where the Swedish population was in Illinois. In Rockwood, if you look in the phone book, you aren’t going to find any Smiths. He really started in model cement. Testor was in the nail polish and shoe polish business originally, and he went bankrupt. He used to supply Woolworth’s and the 5 and 10′s eventually broke him because of the prices. When they did that, he got into the glue business for models and then paint right after that. He grew from there because he was a very energetic, hard working guy. He wasn’t going to let the fact that he had failed in one field put him down.
B: Didn’t they call glue and paint dope in those days?
N: Yes, they used to call any paint dope because in the beginning airplanes were covered with cloth. To get them stretched and to paint them, they had a paint that was called dope. In the real or prototype airplane field, the paint was also called dope. So, the model industry called it dope as well, because it would do to paper what it did to the cloth on the real airplane, it would shrink it. They didn’t call it dope because of the models, it was called dope on the real aircraft. The Berry Brothers in Detroit were the biggest manufacturers of paint for aircraft at that time – they were called Berry Loid. We used to get money from them to help sponsor model airplane contests.
It would be a much more poetic life if everything was as eloquent as this pencil…instead of “Made in China” we had “made in the northern province in the factory alongside the river”.