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When I was a very young child I remember going to the "Lad and Lassie" toy store in
Blytheville, Arkansas. It was owned by a close friend of my father, Wallace Smith.
To me in 1963 this was the greatest store in the world as it had model cars galore,
boats, and planes with real gas engines, Lionel trains with a huge track layout that
had a slot car track built into the train layout. The full Tonka Line, and the
complete Matchbox collection, plus anything and everything a boy or girl would want.

My dad told me to get whatever I wanted, so I took my time trying to take everything
in. The Tonka Fire trucks were super cool, as were the new Lionel Trains, but for
some strange reason I gravitated to the Matchbox display. The display was a carousel
full of cars and trucks listed by numbers one through seventy-five. In the case below
were the Majors, Yesteryear and other Matchbox stuff.

I was taken in by the high detail of the cars and trucks. I wanted them all for my train
set at home. I looked up at Dad and said, "This is what I want." Dad and Mr. Smith
laughed, and Dad said, "Son you can't have the display but you can get as many cars as
you want. The price was 49 cents each so it didn't take me too long to figure out that
ten would cost five dollars. I looked at Dad and said "Is ten dollars to much?" Dad said,
"No, just get what every you want. I spent the next two hours turning the display and
trying to decide which twenty cars I would get. I don't remember which ones I got but
I do remember one in particular, a cream colored van that said Radio Rentals. It came
with a sliding back door and three little red TV's plus an antenna to put on top of the
truck. From that moment in time I have been enamoured with the pre-1969 Matchbox toys
and I still want the complete collection that I saw that day in 1963.
I've got a way to go, but I'm working on it.

started making good money at my last job...didnt like it much...started collecting to alleviate the stess and focus on something else other than a job i didnt want to be at...first model i bought off ebay was a #38 honda motorcycle and trailer...as that was one i never had as a kid...why i dont know since a childhood friend had one and i loved it

so i started collecting and then it became a sickness haha!

The matchbox cars are what I grew up with. Every Christmas my brother and I would get a kingsize truck. We had the cars but I don't recall when and where we got them. My parents were missionaries over seas and we could not afford a lot so these meant a lot to us. At some point after we left home for college my mom got rid of all of them.
When I see and handle them they always remind me of a simpler time.
One in particular. When I was really young, probably 1 or 2 grade I had the kingsize articulated horse truck. I remember being mad at mom and dad about some thing. So I decided to run away from home. I had a small bag with some cookies and that truck. Hiked down to the end of a dead end road. About a half mile, played for a while and ate the cookies. Needless to say I was back home in less than an hour. Then I was really mad because no one noticed I had run away. But every time I see that truck I recall that event. It is still one of my favorite toys and I am always looking for the perfect one.

Great stories, all.

For me, collecting is about the search for simple things and by extension simpler times.

I can still remember the smell of the red vinyl covered card board trays when I opened my first Matchboxes on Christmas Day. I think it was 1966 or 1967. (When did the blue plastic trays come out in the US?).
It's been a few years since I've smelled that smell. Pretty sure that particular VOC chemical is banned from children's toys sold in the US today!
My god mother gave me a box of 20? 24? morels for Christmas and then another box on my birthday in March. Eventually HotWheels came out and my interest in Matchboxes faded away a bit. I was a very lucky and happy kid. While I was in college, my mother threw away most of my diecast cars, keeping only the ones in near mint condition. Apparently she hadn't considered that the most scratched models were my favorite ones to play with!

Now as an adult I appreciate the detail and wide range of Lesneys. I have re-collected all the ones I had as a kid plus the ones I coveted as a child and I am working on the older ranges that I had not known existed. There are so many to find and so much to learn. I don't mind play worn models because to me that means they were loved by a child.

Happy hunting!
Kurt

MatchboxFreak wrote:Great stories, all.

For me, collecting is about the search for simple things and by extension simpler times.

I can still remember the smell of the red vinyl covered card board trays when I opened my first Matchboxes on Christmas Day. I think it was 1966 or 1967. (When did the blue plastic trays come out in the US?).
It's been a few years since I've smelled that smell. Pretty sure that particular VOC chemical is banned from children's toys sold in the US today!
My god mother gave me a box of 20? 24? morels for Christmas and then another box on my birthday in March. Eventually HotWheels came out and my interest in Matchboxes faded away a bit. I was a very lucky and happy kid. While I was in college, my mother threw away most of my diecast cars, keeping only the ones in near mint condition. Apparently she hadn't considered that the most scratched models were my favorite ones to play with!

Now as an adult I appreciate the detail and wide range of Lesneys. I have re-collected all the ones I had as a kid plus the ones I coveted as a child and I am working on the older ranges that I had not known existed. There are so many to find and so much to learn. I don't mind play worn models because to me that means they were loved by a child.

Happy hunting!
Kurt

Kurt i know that smell...i remember it from the drawer style case i got in 1965...i relive that memory every time i open a shower curtain package

I absolutely love to read stories like this and it never ceases to amaze me how many of us have similar stories, even though we might live countries away from each other. I wish every Matchbox collector on the forum would put a little history for us to enjoy and ponder on.

Every Saturday for several years my Grandmother would take me and my little brother to a small town close by that had a WT Grants and a Woolworths. We would have between $ .50 cents and a $1.50 to spend. We started off at Grants and we would stand there and look at every car they had, then ponder some more. All the while my Grandmother just stood by and smiled at us. If we were not able to find what we wanted on that day, we then went down the road to Woolworths. Once we arrived there, we repeated the same search that we had done at Grants. Every once and a while, she would have to take us back to Grants were we would make our purchases. Now the hard part of the story is when we would get back to her house, we would tear the ends of the boxes off and use the boxes as garages. It is hard to imagine today that we did that.

Christmas was also a great Matchbox time for us. We would get a good many (10 to 20) each along with a couple of King Size. Somewhere I have a photo of me and my brother on Christmas morning and in the back ground you can see a Regular Wheel blister pack that I opened (that hurts), two piles of empty boxes that is going in the trash, and a red and yellow gift set box that was also going to be thrown away. I know that we were only kids, but it still hurts to see those boxes and the empty blister pack on the floor knowing that they were thrown in the trash.

Fast forward a ways and I got married at a very, very young age. When I moved out with my wife I carried my two Matchbox carrying cases with me. As we moved over the years the two cases went right along with me. One time we were moving and a good friend of mine came to help, and he saw the cases. This was in 1991. He said I have a bunch of them too and did you know they are probably worth some money? It was nice to hear that they might be worth something, but I wouldn't have sold them for a million dollars. They meant too much to me. A couple of weeks later he and I and our wives went to a big antique show together. I saw on a table a man who had a group of well played with cars on his table. I picked them up and remembered the ones that I had at home. Then I made the comment to the guy, I guess it would be impossible to find these still in good shape and in their boxes. He then replied, I have some right here. From under the table he pulled out 12 cars (all common) that were mint with nice boxes. I paid him $25 each for all 12. I was so excited. You would have thought that I struct gold. I took them home, cleaned out a metal cabinet, and placed them on one of the shelves, right in the middle, perfectly stacked.

From those 12 cars, this is what they have grown to: http://www.mbxrw.com

My favorite items to collect is blister packs and paper. Not that all of the rest isn't special to me, but these two categories are my favorites. Thanks for reading!

my earliest memories are going to the local woolworths with my dad and half-a-crown (about 25p) pocket money and being allowed to choose what I wanted ,nearly always a 1-75 sometimes a husky and more often than not some sweets with the change . sadly all now gone .

I am trying to replace all my childhood matchbox cars that my mum kindly gave to a neighbours child as a gift when i was in my teens without my knowledge. That family moved away from where i lived and took MY collection with them never to be seen again. I only found out about my loss a few years ago when i asked my mum where all the matchbox toys me and my brother played with where. That's when i found out about my loss, What a shit day that turned out to be!!

Thanks mum!!

Why collecting? & Why Matchbox?

Just over 10 years ago I made a conscious decision to work less.
I'm a primary school teacher and would get home from work and then in the evenings would be in my study doing school "stuff".
Same for the weekends - I'd just turned 50 and thought that there were better and more enjoyable ways to spend my evenings.

Around the same time I went back to the UK to visit my family and my Mother one day got a box out and said "Here are some of your old thing, have a look through and then either take to the Charity shop or back to New Zealand."

Inside the box were lots of my old toys that my Mother had kept, cleaned and stored away. There was a range of Corgi, Dinky, Meccano, Matchbox and various others in play worn condition. I started going through them and kept admiring the Matchbox and remembering how my parents would get me models on special occasions. I think it was the army toys that I remembered the most vividly playing with as a youngster.

The upshot was I decided to get the box shipped back to NZ (for some reason my wife did not agree that I could put them in the luggage and she didn't really need to do all that shopping!)

Back in NZ I started a small display and then looked around to find out where I could find other models. I went to the library and got some books on Matchbox (think the Scheiffer & Mack books). Looking through them and going by the pictures, there didn't seem to be that many models so thought this would be an interesting hobby and it wouldn't take me long to collect 75 models.
In NZ we have TradeMe which is similar to eBay. I signed up and started to buy Matchbox also looked out for models at markets - classic beginner - bought everything regardless of condition.

Joined MCCH forum (think I had to be nominated by by a member) at the suggestion of a seller that I'd bought a lots of models off.

A whole new world of variation appeared and the more I read the more I got into the variations. I love lists, organising things putting things into order and finding out why something happened - so the world of variations was like an Aladin's cave.
I haven't got a bug budget for collecting so I sell as well as buy and to do that you need to be knowledgeable about what you are selling. Remember selling 8A caterpillar with yellow rollers and stating that it had been touched up by someone who had painted the rollers (years of therapy have helped me get over it ).

One of the reasons I enjoy this forum is the wealth of knowledge available and the fact that 60 years on new variations are being found.
At some point the collection will be sold to help in my retirement so gradually reducing the volume of models and concentrating on quality.

Though I'm beginning to get the Moko bug and want to collect the pre 1949 large models!

Some cool stories. I will add mine.

I was born in 1972, and as a child I was very interested in cars. I knew nothing of the workings of an engine, but you point out a car to me, and I could tell you the make and model. I loved cars. The shapes, the designs. So that translated into toy cars. I "stole" my sisters small toy car collection when I was about 18 months old, and kept playing with them. Slowly as I was growing up it became obvious that I just loved to play with toy cars over anything else. I had other things. Play-doh (although whatever colour it started off as by the time I finished it ended up brown), an Etch-a-sketch, puzzles and Lego. I had wooden blocks I used to build things with too. But I kept veering towards the toy cars. I used to have little roadway sections to build roads, but quite often I used to design my own roads on sheets of paper and put them all over the floor for playing on.

So the toy cars. In England, particularly near me, Matchbox and Corgi were the main ones to be found. If I was on holiday by the coast (particularly south) I could find more Majorette, and the occasional Siku. I did find an odd Hot Wheels model along the way too, but the MB and Corgi ones were the easiest to find. Matchbox in particular used to have prominence in the major places I went to. In 1980, I picked up a Corgi and Matchbox Rover 3500 (well they were picked up for me, as I was only 8), and I hated that 2 versions of the same vehicle were so different. I did not want to have both. As I was looking at them to decide which to keep and which to dispose of, the window fell out of the Corgi one. So that made my decision for me. I decided from that moment I would only collect Matchbox. All other brands of toy cars were discarded from my collection and from that moment on I collect Matchbox only. I decided to go back as far as the transitional Superfast, as regulars were all before my time so they have no real meaning to me on a personal level. I also decided to go for miniatures only, as I had odd Superkings and a Yesteryear or 2, but they were too big to work with everything else. But I sometimes feel like I never want to grow up, and I have never stopped picking them up. I still collect the new stuff coming out now. The daft thing is, as a kid one of my biggest memories was of visiting my local Tesco store and looking at Matchbox models on pegs. Guess what? Last Saturday I went to that same Tesco store and was looking through pegs of Matchbox. It is still my local store. I live about 2 miles away from my childhood home, and the Tesco store is the local one for both houses (it is sort of between them). Sometimes it brings a smile to my face remembering that I still do what I did as a young child.