I don’t like the word “hoarder.” Its an ugly word with an ugly connotation and I won’t use it to describe myself. Nope, I prefer to think of myself as a “pack-rat!” See? That’s much more positive! I keep almost everything, but I keep shiny things, things of value, or at the very least, things are meaningful to me. Yet, even that set-up might not quite explain the contents of this heavy cardboard box, which I have been carrying around with me since my age was in the single digits; this heavy box has traveled around the country with me to 3 states and multiple domiciles, and once you take a look inside, that ugly “H”-word just may occur to you…
What you are looking at here are the remains of nearly every die-cast toy car that didn’t survive my childhood!
Now, I have some pretty big plans for this pile of junk, and, oh yes, I will be going into great detail about those plans in a future post! But for now, this is a launching pad for a discussion about an idea that occurred to me back in 2016 and which I am still working on to this day…a project I’ve appropriately dubbed “The GET-BACKS.”
My memory of my childhood, even of objects and events going back as far as the age of two, has never ceased to amaze my parents and older relatives. I can’t claim that I can remember every single die-cast car that I ever owned in my life…but honestly, I think I can! I mean, that’s the thing about memory, right? If you don’t remember, then…how would you know? But I can remember so many of the toy cars that I had from the ages of 3 to 10 that for one reason or another are no longer with me. In many cases I can’t account for the disappearances; some were no doubt stolen, others traded or perhaps sold for quarters to other kids in the neighborhood, and a few likely got buried so deeply in sandboxes that they were never seen again.
In a few cases I can actually remember the exact fate of a particular car. One particularly poignant memory is of the Corgi Jr. ’69 Mercury Cougar fire chief car; that may have been the very first toy car I got when my family moved back to California from Massachusetts when I was 6 years old; I had just got it, and we went to the beach shortly after-it was the first time I had ever been on a Pacific Ocean beach-and I put my new car on the sand as a wave came in, just playing in the water, without knowing that the wave was strong enough to suck it out to sea! My dad dove into the water for it , but he wasn’t able to recover it.
As for the rest? Most of them wound up in pieces in that box, so there’s evidence! So one day 8 years ago I thought, what would happen if I went on a mission to get them all back? Every Matchbox, every Hot Wheels, every Tomica, every Yatming and Zylmex and Play Art, even every Majorette…would it even be possible for me to find them all, and if I did, could I afford them???
Well in many cases, it turned out the answer was NO! Especially in the case of the Hot Wheels, many of the cars I lost or destroyed as a kid are now so valuable that the best I could do was get rough models of them; you can see that in some of the cars in this case; the orange Porsche 917, the Ferrari 312P, and the super-chrome “Heavy Chevy” are in pretty rough shape because they’re worth of a lot of money now. A few others, like the Tomica Toyota Crown taxi-cab, are so hard to find that the model you see here is the best I could do.
What you will notice-if you are a die-cast collector with a keen eye, that is-is that this 48-car case I dedicated to this project contains every brand except Matchbox. One of the reasons for that is because the Matchboxes were always my favorites so they were more likely to survive; the other brands…well, let’s just say they were a little more likely to get entered into the childhood demolition derbys. But the other reason is that the Matchboxes which were part of the “Get-Backs” project went into cases of their own, dedicated to the brand. There are plenty of them, and while some are easy to find, others were quite expensive to recover.
Such is the price for ignorance! But hey, think of all the Boomers who scrapped real cars, like my dad did when he left his india ivory over dusk pearl ’57 Chevy Bel-Air 2-door sedan at a junkyard in Missouri in 1966! That’ll keep you up at night!
So, this game continues! There are a few others I’m still looking for (one that is maddeningly elusive is a Majorette Citroen DS21 ambulance with cool little plastic flags on the front bumper, which I keep finding for sale with amber windows or the wrong style wheels; mine had blue windows, and it has to be the exact one I had!) and I also would like to get some nicer examples of some of the ones I’ve already re-acquired, like that chrome ’67 Camaro or that orange “Flying Colors” Porsche 917, which I can probably do now that I have a little more money (although of course prices are a lot higher now!) But I’m not going to stop; oh no, far from it! In fact, it was only in the last couple of weeks that I found and bought a couple of Kidco models I once had, a yellow Mustang convertible and a bright blue ’63 Corvette (both of which I mentioned in this recent post) so I’m buying them still! You can say I’m getting a little crazy in my old age, and you’re probably right, but I don’t care…
I won’t rest until I have them ALL BACK!
This is bring back so many memories! There are a couple that you have pictured here that I had as well but had forgotten about, like the Turismo, the paddy wagon, and the Seville (though mine was the Hot Wheels in gold). I don’t think pack-rat is a correct term. I prefer “archivist”! I remember a lot but certainly not all but when I see pictures like this, it makes me remember “oh yeah, I had that!” I had some red-lines that I commandeered that had been my uncle toys. I too have several bookmarked that I want to get again and have plans for more display shelving in my study. I think this is a worthwhile endeavor!