Bill Ward’s Brickpile

The Early Years

Like most American boys of my generation (I was born in 1971), I grew up with LEGO. I can’t really remember for sure what my first LEGO set was, but there were a few that stand out as highlights from my childhood. I have vague memories of playing with some of these sets at various points, and still have most of the parts from them. Two sets that stand out from my early childhood were 430 Biplane and 456 Spirit of St. Louis. I also had a number of the pre-minifig sets, such as 550 Windmill, 580 Gravel Quarry, and 485 Fire Truck. Those sets all came out in 1975 when I was 4 years old, so they must have been some of my very earliest LEGO sets. It’s hard to imagine a 4-year-old playing with the Gravel Quarry, though!

When the minifigure came out in 1978, I was just the perfect age for it (7). I dove headfirst into the Classic Space theme and every birthday and Christmas would pester my parents for years to get me those. My favorite set from that era was 497 Galaxy Explorer, which I got for Christmas in 1979.

But then, as is very common, other things became interesting to me: mostly computer programming. I started playing with Commodore PET computers at school in 1981 and got my first computer, a VIC-20, in 1982. I was writing simple BASIC programs but had little enthusiasm for video games. I later got a 64 and then a 128. I look back now and see that the skills I developed playing LEGO translated into programming for me. Just like LEGO bricks can fit together in a certain number of ways and you can create structures to achieve a particular aim by putting them together, software instructions can be assembled to create a program. I tell parents this all the time, encouraging them to get their kids working with LEGO…

The Dark Ages

So as I became a teenager, the LEGO was played with less and less. I kept it around, but rarely if ever did anything with it. At some point I think it was boxed up and put in the basement. Luckily for me, my mother insisted on keeping all my LEGO – she figured it would be for her grandchildren, but little did she know…

The First Awakening

In my junior year of college, I moved in with the woman who is now my wife. One day in 1993 I was shopping one day at Game-Alot, a toy store in downtown Santa Cruz, and they had some new LEGO space sets that caught my attention, in the Ice Planet 2002 line. I bought the big Deep Freeze Defender set.

I asked my mother for my LEGO collection, and started playing LEGO Space again, building a few spaceships of the kind I had made in my early teen years. However, that didn’t really “stick” as a hobby; Holly tried to be supportive but there’s only so much enthusiasm one can expect in that situation… Since I didn’t know anyone else who was into LEGO as a hobby, and if there was any online LEGO community I didn’t know about it, I wasn’t really challenged to do anything more with it and put it away shortly thereafter. Anyway, 1993 was the year I was graduating college and entering the workforce so I had more important things to worry about.

AFOL At Last

In 2000, Eric Harshbarger’s LEGO Desk was featured on Slashdot. My brother-in-law Jim, living in Japan, saw it and sent me the link, having heard about my previous interest in LEGO. I went over to Eric’s site and looked at some of his other creations that he had done at that time, such as the Tux the Linux Penguin and Alice from “Alice in Wonderland”, and thought “Hmm, I could do that.”

I went to Toys-R-Us and bought a bunch of the 3033 tubs at $20 each (some of them on sale for $15 as I recall) and started building. At that time, my wife and I had been watching a lot of Pokémon videos, collecting the VHS tapes at flea markets and such, and so I built a few sculptures of Pokémon creatures. First I built a pokeball (having heard that LEGO Master Builders are challenged with the task of building a sphere from basic bricks, I decided to try it), and then I built Pikachu, Bulbasaur, and Squirtle.

I’m not quite sure where I first heard about LUGNET or BayLUG, but I did, and started spending a lot of time online at the LUGNET forums for various themes, and going to BayLUG meetings. My first BayLUG meeting was in March 2001 and I brought my Pokémon.

In September of 2001, shortly after 9/11, I was laid off from my job. I spent six weeks hunting for a new job, and at the same time working on a new model, the PB4Y-2 Privateer which my dad had flown in the Navy in the Korean War. His health was failing at that time, and I was building the model as a way of trying to reconnect with him. As it turns out, he never did get to see the model. He died in early November of 2001, a few days after I started work at Oracle. I brought the finished plane to his memorial service, though, and many of his Navy buddies were there and said nice things about it.

I guess the rest of the story can be found in my blog posts. At first I was writing about LEGO in my existing Blosxom-based blog at the time, bill.wards.net, and then later I started the Brickpile blog and started moving my LEGO posts over here. As of this writing (November 2008) the transition is incomplete, and many of my LEGO posts have yet to be moved over from the old site to Brickpile, but hopefully by the time you read this it will all be moved over, and maybe I’ll even start adding new non-LEGO content on that site…

–Bill.