Skip Amass runs his elaborate model train setup in the basement of his Westminster home.
Written By Sherwood Kohn, Photos by: Crystal Griffiths
As with most of us, the Skip Amass you might happen upon on the streets of Westminster is more than meets the eye.
At 79, Amass is a short, genial man who wears half-rimless glasses and has the grey remains of a full head of hair; the kind of gentleman you might encounter behind the pharmacy counter of your local drugstore.
Which would be the case. He is indeed a pharmacist and has worked at and owned various drugstores around Carroll County. He is also very active in philanthropic organizations in the community. But there is a lot more to the man.
For openers, “Skip” is more than just a nickname. He remembers that the line identifying him on his 1931 birth certificate read “Fifth Baby Amass.”
It was a reference to his place in the sequence of the siblings who had preceded him, and was obviously meant as a filler that would quickly be replaced by a name.
But in the crush of events, nobody thought about that formality until it was too late. And at that point, an uncle said, “I’ll call him ÔSkipper.’”
Still, what sounded like a nickname was too late for the birth certificate. “Fifth Baby Amass” remained Skip Amass’ official name (everyone called him “Skip”) until he hit first grade, at which point his teacher, who could not abide “Skip,” dubbed him “Arnold.”
Even then, “Fifth Baby Amass” stayed on his birth certificate, and later, on his passport, causing the National Security Agency’s pharmacist problems in international travel until he finally had it legally changed.
Born in Baltimore (his family emigrated there from eastern Europe in the 1880s), Amass (rhymes with “famous”) attended Western Maryland (now McDaniel) College until he was drafted in the 1950s, trained by the Army as an X-ray technician and shipped off to a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) unit in Korea.
Back in the U.S., he resumed his studies at Western Maryland, where he met his wife, Patricia, and graduated with a degree in biology. After that, he studied pharmacology at the University of Maryland and worked at Reed’s Drug Store on Westminster’s Main Street. Eventually, he opened his own drug store in Finksburg, bought one in Taneytown in the 1960s and sold both in the 1970s to work for Drug Fair in Westminster as a pharmacist.
He served on the Cancer Society’s national board for 28 years; lead the establishment of Hope Lodges, where cancer patients and their families can stay free of charge while the patients are under treatment; and worked as the Carroll Hospital Center’s first pharmacist. Along the way, he found the time to bring up a son, Gerald (Amass now has a grandson, Jordan, 12).
One night some years ago, Amass met a former pharmaceutical college classmate at a Cancer Society dinner in Baltimore.
The man, Dr. George Keller, turned out to be an official with one of the country’s key intelligence gatherers, the National Security Agency (NSA). Keller recruited Amass and became his boss. Subsequently, the NSA sent Amass to the University of Maryland to earn a Ph.D. in pharmacology. When Keller retired, Amass became director of biomedical services for the NSA, which meant that he was head of the agency’s pharmacy, laboratory, x-ray and drug testing activities.
“It was like working for a small hospital,” said Amass, “except in those days you couldn’t even tell people where you worked.”
Security was so stringent at the NSA that department doors were identified by numbers, not names, and computers were often draped to hide their screens from casual eyes.
As well they might be. Part of the mission of the NSA’s biomedical services was to accumulate health dossiers on foreign leaders and their underlings, in order to determine their vulnerabilities. The other missions included routine inoculations and medications for agents being sent out into the field. The rest, said Amass, were too secret to talk about, even now, after nine years of retirement.
These days, there are plenty of other subjects that Amass is willing, even eager, to discuss. One of them is his hobby, a model train setup that has, with the help of his friend, Bill Gavin, a retired vice president of Random House, swallowed most of his Westminster home’s basement for the last 11 years.
“It started with a 4 by 8 foot layout,” said Amass, “then grew to 8 by 16, and finally to 24 by 30.”
The diorama’s so large and intricate that Amass has lost track of how much he has spent on building it.
“I don’t know,” he said, “and I’m sure my wife doesn’t want to know.”
Now nationally recognized among model train enthusiasts and one of the largest in the state, with some 700 miles of “O” gauge railroad track, it all started when Amass was a child, as a father-and-son activity. It is now a miniature town, or several towns, that include a model of Westminster’s Main Street, circa 1912, complete with a campaign stand at the east end, hung with a banner proclaiming, “Teddy Roosevelt for President.”
In addition to the usual tunnels and tiny trees, there are also working models of a carnival, complete with Ferris wheel and carousel, a trolley car, a population of hundreds of scale figures, and models of the Western Maryland, B&O, Maryland Midland and Pennsylvania Railroads, all computer controlled and enhanced with digital sound effects.
But the model railroad layout is not just one of those private obsessions. Around Christmas time every year, Amass invites 250-300 visitors into his home to view the scene and builds smaller setups for Carroll Hospital Center (where Amass was the institution’s first pharmacist) for an annual benefit raffle.
Which is only a hint of Amass’ community involvement. A member of the local Rotary Club for 40 years, he was its first president. He served on the Carroll County School Board for eight years and was its president at one point. He also founded the Carroll Community College’s Sports Hall of Fame in the 1980s, is currently on the board of the Carroll Community College Foundation, has served as TV commentator for Westminster’s Memorial Day parade – the oldest such event in the U.S. – and is well known locally for his philanthropic activities.
At this point, however, model trains are his favorite pastime.
“I’m very fortunate,” he said, “ My wife loves them as much as I do.”
