A legend in any scale: Chevy celebrates Hot Wheels’ 50th anniversary at SEMA

Heh. I seem to recall an incident involving a Hot Wheels car, a length of that straight orange track - and one of the 1/2A Estes rocket motors taped to the car.

It went airborne well before it ran out of track. Never did find it. :-)

We got all our Matchbox and Hot Wheels at Ed Schock’s Toy & Hobby Shop. It was heaven for kids. Ed also had the Estes rockets with the solid propellant. And a great selection of Revell plastic model warships.

All of which met their explosive demise in the drainage ditch after being shot up by BB guns.

I got most of my Matchbox cars at Meijer's Thrifty Acres (now just called Meijer's). They were four for $1 in the early to mid 60s and my parents would let me have $1 worth of cars if I had behaved.

I did the Estes rockets when I was a teen. When I got bored with a rocket model I would use one of the first stage engines that had the ability to ignite a second stage engine and pack black powder above the engine. When the first stage engine fired the top portion there would be a cool explosion.

We would take our plastic ship models out to a tiny pond on my Uncle's dairy farm and put glue all over them then light them on fire. As they floated on the pond we would blow the heck out of them with the BB guns just like you and yours did.

A lot of great fun as a kid!

Great! Do you happen to have any of the old original Matchbox models when it was the Lesney Co.? They’d be worth something in the right locale.

I think some of the models I got when I was real young in the early 60s were the Lesney brand.

I remember before I was a young teen some magazine had an article about a man who was placed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the largest collection of Matchbox cars so I went and counted mine and had over 300 more than he. The guy was a piker compared to me but I was only about 11 years old and my parents would never have let me contact the Guinness people as they didn't think much for people who bragged or tried for fame (something to which I agree).

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