Portsmouth man asks big price for huge Titanic model: $263K

PORTSMOUTH

The Titanic dominated Wyatt Moore’s living room, clashing with the mauve-and-red floral decor.

The retired architectural draftsman, whom friends and family call “Chuck,” sounded like a museum curator as he showed off the 9-foot-long replica of the legendary passenger steamship.

“Took nine years, one week and five days to do it,” he said, beaming. “Anything I go into, I go whole hog.”

The model is a marvel, with more than 90,000 parts and intricate details – tiny lights and dime-sized figures Moore painted with a sewing needle. It features a working anchor and cranes, and comes apart to reveal meticulously re-created interior compartments.

He was inspired by the 1953 “Titanic” movie starring Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Wagner. He used his own materials, including spruce, fir and oak. With no blueprint, Moore approximated his scale measurements from archival photos and completed the model in 2004.

The 69-year-old Norfolk native survived kidney cancer and open-heart surgery as he assembled the replica inside the ornately decorated home he shares with Gail, his wife of 30 years.

“I’m ready for it to get out of the living room,” said Gail, a retired

cosmetologist. “I think Chuck wants to let it go, but not just to anybody.”

Moore has been in contact with museums around Hampton Roads, New York, Florida and Tennessee. He also reached out to the Titanic Historical Society in Massachusetts, whose founder sent him a letter in 2008.

“You are to be congratulated in your efforts to produce a unique representation of 'the ship of dreams,’” wrote society founder Edward Kamuda.

But no museum has made an official offer. Earlier this month, at the suggestion of his wife’s cousin, Moore placed an ad on Craigslist with four pictures showcasing the exterior and painstakingly complex interior. He said two prospective buyers have called but hung up immediately after he divulged the asking price: $263,000.

“You have to figure in my time, which I totaled at 17,368 hours I put to it, and I charge $15.15 an hour,” said Moore, a silver-haired man sporting gleaming “bling” – a diamond-encrusted gold watch, diamond pinky ring and a baroque gold cross around his neck. “I put about $5,000 of my own material. You add that all up, and that’s where I got the price.”

When discussing the Titanic model, Moore gave exact measurements of each figure and piece of wood along the base. His love for building things started when he was a child. His father, who assembled model planes, was an inspiration.

“I tried to compete with him, and I couldn’t,” Moore said. “He always criticized me. He said, 'When you get good is when you make ’em like I do.’”

Moore persisted. Before graduating from high school, he said, he built nearly 1,000 model planes, including a B-25 bomber he assembled with one hand after falling on a broken bottle and slicing his palms.

Moore worked as a freelance architectural draftsman, “going wherever the work took me,” he said. He retired in 1980 after more than 20 years. Since then, Moore’s den has also functioned as a work space for his projects. He has built furniture for his wife and other family members. Before starting on the Titanic in 1995, two years before the blockbuster movie with Leonardo DiCaprio hit theaters, Moore built meticulous model boats, planes and missiles – thousands, he said. “I gave them away. I got all the thrill I wanted out of building them.”

The Titanic replica is his magnum opus. Since its completion, Moore said, about 20 neighbors have come by to check it out, sometimes bringing their kids along. “They touch things and break things with their grubby little hands, and I go right back and fix it,” Moore said.

When he’s not showing off the Titanic, he keeps it covered. Dusting the replica, which Moore occasionally does with a cosmetics brush, consumes most of the day.

Moore said he would like for the Titanic to end up in a museum, but a private buyer can have it, if the price is right.

“That’s a lot of work, nine years of my life,” Moore said, surveying the replica from a cranberry-red Queen Anne chair. “I’ve looked at it long enough. Whoever makes me the best offer can have it – at least half the asking price. It’ll sit here and rot before I sell it for less.”

Rashod Ollison, (757) 446-2732, rashod.ollison@pilotonline.com