Tom Lauria was born in the Bronx, New York in 1952. He started building kit models when he was about seven years old and was hopelessly hooked. When he was in his early twenties, he met William Quincy, a master model builder at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. Mr. Quincy patiently answered all Tom’s questions on a host of model related topics and it changed the way Tom thought about models and building them.

 Shortly after, he joined the Nautical Research Guild and eagerly devoured all the information contained in their quarterly journals. Numerous trips to all the maritime museums in the northeast furthered his modeling education. He started restoring half hulls for the Larchmont Yacht Club in New York and in 1987, moved to Nantucket where model building became a fulltime job.

 In 1994 Tom and his family moved to Cape Cod, where they live today. He is an active member of the U.S.S. Constitution Model Shipwright Guild. Being a Guild member has been another important step in Tom’s life. The Guild has such a wide range of members with so many varied interests and knowledge that it has proved an inexhaustible resource for anything nautical or model related.