When I was ten years old, I had a very memorable birthday party.
Friends from my cub scout den as well as schoolmates and neighbors were at
my house watching me unwrap a rather curious looking rectangular box.  To my
surprise, it ended up being a box of girl scout cookies!  Or was it.....?

Amid my friends' snickering, my mom told me to go ahead and pass the
cookies out to my friends.  Upon doing so, I discovered the cookie box was
packed with more than a few original redline Hot Wheels cars!  Immediately
my friends were green with envy.  The box contained the latest models,
including the Red Baron, which to this day is still one of my favorites.

From there, more cars were purchased, as well as a couple of track sets.
Later on, RRRumblers and Heavyweights were part of my childhood plan.
However, after a year or so, baseball, biking and such began to take hold of
my pre-teen years, and Hot Wheels purchases slowed down to a crawl.

As the years went by, and I had all but forgotten about my undying love
for Hot Wheels.  In December of 1999, I was looking through a box of my old
grade school papers my mother had given me years ago.  I found a single
piece of notebook paper with drawings of Hot Wheels cars I had made when I
was young.  I began to remember what I had done... I placed select cars in
front of me on the table and drew a detailed picture of each car.

There were 8 cars I drew : The Demon, Custom T-Bird, Paddy Wagon, Fire Chief
Cruiser, Peeping Bomb, Sand Crab, Lotus Turbine and Classic '57 Bird.  At
the bottom right-hand corner of the page I wrote, "And 3 more!!" and simply
wrote (in my newly learned penmanship) "Custom Eldorado, Silhouette,
Torero."  Of the eleven cars mentioned on the paper, I only had four left
that I had stored in an old RRRumblers case with the remains of my original
collection.  I had even traced around 2 original tin badges (what ever
happened to those??) and drew them as well.

I took out the old case of redlines and became intrigued.  I was
suddenly bombarded with many incredibly good memories of my childhood, some
of which were made possible by the good folks at Mattel.

I immediately began a quest to find all the original redlines I was
missing from my childhood collection.  The plan was to buy back all the
models I used to have. I even remembered what colors they were.

I had some money to spend, so I got many of the remaining cars through
internet auctions, but I was lucky enough to find some people through the
internet who would sell me some of their cars off-auction.

It took awhile, but I finally got all of the cars back.  

I doubt I'll ever sell my collection, because I hope that one day
another ten-year-old will open up the case and say, 

"These belonged to my great-grandfather. They were made a long time ago... 

around the time men first landed on the moon!"

Nat Turdo