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What else do you guys collect?

Started by Steve, December 22, 2008, 10:15:14 PM

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Dennis Markham

The Lionel factory is a stone-throw away from where I live.  I've driven past it a million times but never thought to stop in and see if they have a public exhibit or tour or something.  I heard at one time they were going out of business. 

Ben, your stuff is awesome!


benhutcherson

HobieSport,
The Scotsman's been operating on and off over the years.

The last I heard, things were tied up with red tape, and they weren't really operating-although the plan was to return it to operation soon.

Dennis,
Lionel hasn't actually made anything at the Chesterfield factory for several years now. I think around 2000 or so was when they went overseas.

Unfortunately, they were the victim of a shifting market. Lionel isn't so much a toy company any more-their big target are adults with big budgets, who unfortunately are very picky and demanding. It wasn't feasible for them to turn out the models that the buyers want(and that other companies were giving them) while remaining price competitive and remain stateside.

They kept their head offices and visitor center at Chesterfield for a while, however the visitor center closed a year or two ago. There's been a push from upper level management to move back to New York, where they started out. Right now, the only thing that's still in Michigan is service, although they recently opened a facility for that in Ohio, and it's expected that everything will soon move there. The last I heard, the Chesterfield building is for sale.

In any case, Lionel did file Chapter 11 a few years ago, but had a solid reason for doing so. That's another story in and of itself. They've just emerged from Chapter 11 recently, and are very healthy again.

McHeath

Ramil: there are quite a few folks in my town from the Philippines, my school site psychologist for one, and a co-workers lawyer husband for another.  Seems most of the local doctors are now from India or Pakistan or the Philippines as well, and we even have a fair number of folks from the Middle East including a sweet little kid at school from Yemen who's favorite show when she and her family lived there was "Walker: Texas Ranger".   I've had Philippine "dinuguan", or at least that's what the family who made called it, and it was little too exotic for my tastes.  

When I was a kid I helped dad put up a new mailbox at our place in the country.  About 3 feet down he found a clay bottle pretty similar to the one you found on your dig in Manila.  

Ben:  nice trains!  Really like the old transformers, never seen anything like that.  My son model railroads in N scale, he likes to buy Kato stuff from Japan, pricey but well made.  I had a Lionel O scale set when I was a kid, but it was just a normal plastic deal from the early 70s so I'm sure it was not worth much, and  when I was younger I had an HO scale layout but again, it was nothing to write home about.  You have some very interesting rolling stock on your layout, and your equipment is mega cool what with those antique transformers.  

mienaichizu

Quote from: HobieSport on January 08, 2009, 09:05:11 PM
Ramil,  Very cool diggings.  Thanks for the links.  Of course when I hear about the Philippines I think of MacArthur...  Not looking very far back, I know... back to the Spanish and even earlier periods.  But have you found Dougs' pipe yet?  Huhuhu.  See? I learned to laugh in Filipino! ;D


thanks Matt but Dougs' pipe I know he hid it in his pocket, hahaha, but we dug up some clay pipes in Manila, we presume it its from the Spanish Pd.

HobieSport

Quote from: mienaichizu
Thanks Matt but Dougs' pipe I know he hid it in his pocket, hahaha, but we dug up some clay pipes in Manila, we presume it its from the Spanish Pd.

I figured as much.  If ol' Doug had dropped his pipe, he probably returned to get it back anyway. ;)

mienaichizu

#50
Quote from: McHeath on January 08, 2009, 09:53:01 PM
Ramil: there are quite a few folks in my town from the Philippines, my school site psychologist for one, and a co-workers lawyer husband for another.  Seems most of the local doctors are now from India or Pakistan or the Philippines as well, and we even have a fair number of folks from the Middle East including a sweet little kid at school from Yemen who's favorite show when she and her family lived there was "Walker: Texas Ranger".   I've had Philippine "dinuguan", or at least that's what the family who made called it, and it was little too exotic for my tastes. 

When I was a kid I helped dad put up a new mailbox at our place in the country.  About 3 feet down he found a clay bottle pretty similar to the one you found on your dig in Manila. 


McHeath, so you're living in a multi-cultural community. The "dinuguan", yup its a local delicacy and kinda exotic from the Philippines and I like it very much. The clay bottles, do you still keep it? we've done a research before about it and we found out that it was used as ink bottles, they were manufactured by Carters Ink Company from Boston, I'm not so sure if that company still exists. Some Carters' Ink bottles found its way on eBay, here's one:

http://tinyurl.com/6wtdyv ( dead link 05-19-21 )

McHeath

My mom still has that bottle, it has no markings of any kind and looks to be pretty old.  This area was not settled until the 19th century really, the American Indians were here of course but they never made bottles like these.  The Spanish and later Mexicans more or less just passed through the Central Valley, seeing it as a desert with little use, major settlement here only goes back to the 1850s.





Dennis Markham

Ben, I didn't know all that about the Chesterfield plant.  As I said, I thought I had heard some talk about them going out of business.  The sign is still out front on the 21 Mile Road side.

I guess I should have done some research.  Here is an article from the Detroit News from 2001.  There a couple of good photos here:

http://apps.detnews.com/apps/history/index.php?id=202


HobieSport

Sad about Lionel.  I never studied the history but they seem like such an American icon.  I hope they start building them here again.  Keep us posted, Ben!

winkydink

#54
I finally had a chance to take a picture or two of my other hobby, Old Toys, and vintage electronic games.

My collection is mostly vintage 1960's (basically toys that I was familar with from the realms of my own childhood).  A couple of examples are shown below.

The first is a couple of "Thingmaker" sets from the mid 1960.  MiniDragons and Picadoos.  These were of the same genre as the Creepy Crawler sets.  You poured Plastigoop into molds, heated them up in a "Thingmaker" and the would harden.  With the Mini Dragon's set you could put then together in an almost unlimited fashion.

The next item are a pair of vintage Mattel pull string talking toys.  The first is a Mr Ed talking hand puppet.  The second is a Casper the friendly Ghost doll.  Both these items had voice boxes that had a small record with about a dozen sayings.  You pull the string and you randomly get one of the sayings.  Mr Ed says "Who ever heard of a talking horse", or "Horsefeathers" and the like.  Casper says things like, "I'm a friendly Ghost", "Will you be my friend?", etc.

This is the same technology as the old see-and say pull string toys.  Additionally Mattel actually used this technology (plastic records), on a phone toy that they sold in the mid to late 1960's.  Unfortunately, I don't have one of these (but I will enclose a picture).

Lastly, I collect old video game systems and old hand held systems.  I show a picture of part of my hand held collection.  One item in the collection is actually pretty interesting it is call Microvision. 

Microvision was the first hand held game with interchangable cartridges.  It beat the game boy by 10 years.  It was introduced in 1979.  It had a production run from 79 to 82 and about 15 games were produced.  What was really interesting was the fact that the CPU was not in the unit itself, it was rather on the game.  Boy that must have been expensive to do.  Anyway it was ahead of it's time and like most things ahead of it's time it did not fair too well.

Mark Stevens

#55
Neat stuff!  I particularly like your thingmaker sets, neither of which do I remember.  I had the original Creepy Crawlers (made bugs, spiders, etc.) and I also had one called "Creeple People"...remember that?!  It was a strange one, where you made the head, feet and arms of various generic zombie-type creatures, and attached them to a pencil.  (the pointed end would be supported by the feet, the arms would slip over the pencil, and the head was attached to the eraser end)  I never had it, but do you remember the "Incredible Edibles"?  I don't remember what the molds made, but it had edible Plastigoop... that had to be nasty!  :P
(I also had the green hand-held football game you have pictured...I've got much better games then that on my Blackberry!)

McHeath

Hmm, making little zombie people as a kid, yes, verrrrry interesting.



HobieSport

And remember taking Silly Putty and making a transfer of someones face off of a newspaper photo and then stretching and distorting it in fits of insane laughter? Ah, those were the days.  Oh. Wait. It was just me?  Er. Nevermind.

I never could get the Slinky Spring to get down all the basement steps though. Childhood trauma there.

I guess I was easily amused.  We had a big lazy susan and we'd put it in the middle of the floor, load it with marbles, and spin it faster and faster until all the marbles went flying and rolling all over.  Yep.  That would explain when I first started loosing my marbles...

McHeath

Clearly you were a wild child.  Today's kids are a lot safer to have in the house, they are usually just glued in front of the video gaming console and not scattering little round glass balls all over the floor to kill unsuspecting adults or passersby.  Or sending coiled springs of death down the stairs to yet again trap the unsuspecting and innocent adults. 



HobieSport

Actually my older brother was the dangerous one.  Him with his thick glasses and fully stocked chemistry set down in the basement.  He learned how to make slow burning fuses with salt-peter soaked yarn.  We had a natural gas tap in the basement.  So my genius brother decided it might be "neat" to fill a huge dry-cleaning bag with gas, attach a few match-heads on a fuse and let it drift up into the night sky over our otherwise peaceful little town.  We all watched, fidgeting with excitement.  When it lit it propelled itself into a HUGE slowly revolving ball of flame.  The next day at school there were multiple confirmed UFO reports but we didn't let on and had great new respect for our brother.

Unfortunately the next week, hoping for a repeat performance, he did the same thing, but this time it just drifted over into the neighbors apple tree and exploded.