OFF THE SHELF: Harvey Goranson collects what he likes (Part I)

Harvey Goranson collects what he likes. That sounds simple, almost offhand, until you realize how much time and discipline it takes to arrive at a rule like that. In a hobby built on completism, rarity, and the constant temptation to chase whatever comes next, Harvey learned to trust a different instinct. His collection did not grow by accident, and it did not grow by obligation. It grew through fascination, memory, and taste. Over time, what emerged was not just a room full of model cars, but a personal history of the motorcar shaped by the things that genuinely caught hold of him and never quite let go.

That way of collecting began early, though not in any neat or preordained way. In 1950s Nashville, diecast vehicles could turn up almost anywhere that sold toys. Independent toy stores, hobby shops, department stores, five-and-dimes, even hardware stores. And, of course, Christmas mornings. Harvey’s first lasting memory of them is in Lathan’s variety store in Belle Meade, where Dinky Toys sat on display with all the quiet authority of miniature luxury goods. He remembers the 38-series sports and touring cars most vividly, the Lagonda and the Armstrong Siddeley among them.

Around the same time, one of his earliest memories of a real automobile was his grandmother’s blue 1949 Buick sedan, sitting in the garage like a full-sized counterpart to the small cast-metal world beginning to take shape in his imagination.

Even then, Harvey was not simply gathering toys. He was building attachments. A handful of Dinkies became the beginning of a habit of attention, and that habit only deepened when Matchbox arrived in the neighborhood in the late 1950s. A boy next door named Ron brought over the new models from Lathan’s, smaller than Dinky and sold in clever little boxes with faux strike panels on the side. Harvey’s first was the No. 24 Weatherill excavator. Soon Matchbox had taken over the imaginations of kids on the block, and Harvey moved with the times, even selling off most of his early Dinkies through a consignment shop. But what mattered was not the shift from one brand to another. It was the way these small vehicles had already begun to form the outline of a larger world, one made up of memory, design, play, and the first faint stirrings of a collector’s eye.

That world quickly spread beyond the cars themselves. Matchbox models fit naturally into the HO railroads that were growing popular around the same time, and for Harvey the different hobbies soon merged into elaborate floor-bound cities. Roads came from Kenner building systems and Aurora roadways. Buildings rose from American Bricks, Plasticville kits, Kenner skyscraper sets, and early Lego. An Athearn New Haven freight railroad ran through it all. Then, when the city had stood long enough and it was time to tear it down, out came the Airfix soldiers, the Matchbox and Roco tanks, and the whole carefully assembled landscape was destroyed in battle. Only afterward came the sorting, the saving, the putting away. Even then, Harvey was doing something he would spend the rest of his life doing. He was building worlds, then deciding what was worth keeping.

By the early 1960s another revelation arrived, again with Ron. Corgi. These were the ones with windows, the flashier cousins to Dinky, full of color and innovation. Harvey’s first was the Corgi Triumph Herald, and what caught him was the front end, the way the hood and fenders lifted together. Phillips Toy Mart in Nashville became part of the map then, one of those stores that lives forever in a collector’s imagination (a place he later learned that Karl Schnelle also shopped). Many of the Matchbox and Corgis Harvey bought there survived because by then he had begun to take better care of them. He was learning that play and preservation could coexist.

Plastic model kits entered the picture around the same time. AMT, Jo-Han, Revell, Monogram, later IMC. Harvey built them first with enthusiasm, then with growing skill, helped along by Don Emmons’ tips in Rod & Custom magazine. He entered a model-building contest at Woolworth’s while still in sixth grade and took third place in his age group with a 1953 Studebaker set up for the salt flats. He still has the model. He still has the trophy. That matters. Harvey’s instinct has never been just to collect objects. He keeps the evidence of why they mattered.

Then came the article that changed the direction of everything. In 1964 Rod & Custom Models ran a piece by Joe Molloy that opened a door Harvey had not known existed. Those old diecasts, the ones a boy his age was supposed to have outgrown, were not simply toys. They were collectible in the same legitimate way stamps or coins were collectible. Just as important, Molloy introduced him to a much wider universe of makers. Up to that point Harvey had known mostly the British names. Suddenly there were Wiking, Tekno, Norev, Marklin, Solido, RAMI, and more. The hobby expanded from the shelves of local stores into an international language of styles, eras, and specialties. The detailed photos of early handbuilts by Rio and Dugu, with their brass hubs and tiny straps, were especially arresting. Harvey was no longer just interested in the little cars themselves. He was becoming interested in the culture around them.

He did what serious young collectors do when the world gets bigger. He studied. He reread the magazines until they nearly came apart. He sent away for models. He mowed lawns to pay for them. His father helped him get a Rio Isotta Fraschini from Sinclair’s. He bought his first Solido and Tekno models from Replicarz.

There was also a moment of realization that stayed with him. One day some neighborhood kids were talking about old diecasts when a friend named Chris said something that struck Harvey with unusual force: They are still selling the old toys for the original price. In the retail world of the 1960s, old stock should have been marked down to clear it out. But here were these miniature cars, unchanged by time, still sitting on shelves as though they existed outside the usual rules. Harvey understood the implication immediately. If they had survived this long, if they were already obsolete and still being sold at full price, then perhaps they should be worth more, not less. Nostalgia sharpened into intent. From then on he was not only interested in the new. He began seeking the old as well.

That search led him to one of the great places in his collecting life, Austin Electric Shop in Nashville. It was an electric train store that had already seen better days, but behind the counter sat dozens of old Dinkies. By then Harvey had acquired Cecil Gibson’s History of British Dinky Toys, the first one-brand diecast book he knew, and it became his field guide. Armed with Gibson, he could hunt more precisely, looking not just for a model, but for the color or variation he wanted. Eventually Mrs. Austin, by then widowed, would let Harvey and his friend Ron go behind the counter and rummage for themselves. What he found there became the core of his Dinky collection. Long after the store disappeared, erased like so many beloved local places by progress and highways, the memory remained. So did the cars.

By the late 1960s Harvey’s collecting life was widening through mail order as well. Replicarz and later Marque Products, through an inventory that dwarfed Sinclair’s, opened the gates to a much broader universe of diecasts, racing cars, and emerging specialty models. Newsletters arrived monthly and became part of the rhythm of the hobby. The names mattered because the names were how collectors found one another in those days. A list, a newsletter, a classified section, an address in a magazine. This was how a solitary local interest gradually became a network.

Then, in 1968, everything changed in the broader toy world. Hot Wheels arrived. To many kids they were thrilling. To serious diecast collectors they represented a turn away from detail and accuracy toward speed, flash, and cost-cutting imitation. Harvey recognized that shift for what it was. The old makers began chasing a new market, fitting speed wheels and sacrificing some of the exactness that had made them special. It was a pivotal moment in the hobby, and like many longtime collectors he has never entirely forgiven it, though he can appreciate the irony that a set of untouched Hot Wheels from that first year would have been a shrewd investment.

In 1970 Harvey left Nashville for Chicago to study fire protection engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology. Collecting receded for a while, as college life tends to crowd out earlier obsessions. Studies took over. So did girls, fraternity life, and real cars. The sports car world in particular was beginning to pull hard at him. The fraternity parking lots offered their own education in taste. MGs, Triumphs, Porsches, a Sunbeam Tiger, a Shelby Mustang. Harvey’s first personal car was a 1969 AMC Ambassador DPL, but even then he knew it was not the sort of thing he wanted to drive forever.

The collecting spark reignited in 1973 with a Road & Track offer for five Solido race cars at a special price. That was enough to peak interest again. Harvey began combing the Chicago area for toy and hobby shops, using the Yellow Pages as a kind of primitive map of possibility. Along the way he discovered Wiking HO models and eventually built a sizable group of them before deciding to let them go and focus on 1:43 scale. That decision feels like an early sign of the discipline that would later define his approach. He could be expansive, but he was learning to narrow.

After college he went to Omaha for work with the Insurance Services Office. An inheritance from an aunt led him to buy his first true sports car, a 1953 MG TD. It’s hard not to see the child and the collector folded into that choice. He had loved his Dinky MG TF even after its windscreen broke. Now he had the real thing, something he could drive, wrench on, and live with. He put miles on it, collected grease and skinned knuckles, and loved it in the practical, imperfect way people love old British sports cars.

At the same time, the collecting world around him was getting larger and more interconnected. Subscriptions to Traders Horn and Modellers’ World, and purchases from Mini Grid, Grand Prix Models, George Grant’s Memorable Things and others. White metal kits were appearing, then resin, then assembled white metal models that hinted at where the market was heading. Harvey was no longer just a buyer. He was becoming part of an informed, international subculture. He knew the names. He read the publications. He followed the shifts. He was also keeping records, first by hand in lined notebooks, later through word processors, then spreadsheets. That habit tells you something fundamental. Harvey was not simply accumulating. He was documenting.

In 1979 he wrote his first diecast article, on Dinky’s 100-series sports cars, appearing in Modellers’ World. It is one of the key turning points in his story. At some point a collector stops only learning from the hobby and starts giving something back to it. Harvey crossed that line with writing.

The same year he bought his second MG, an Arnolt coupe, one of those odd and fascinating hybrids of design, craftsmanship, and limited production that seem almost destined to attract both collectors and romantics. He borrowed the money, picked up the car in Michigan, stayed a few days to sort out some repairs, and then drove it back to Tennessee. That journey feels perfectly in character.

By 1981 he was ready for a much larger pilgrimage. The trip centered on Le Mans, but it widened into something like a grand tour of Harvey’s many enthusiasms. He drove from Germany into Austria and Italy, visited collectors, made his way to Turin, and found himself inside the Lancia museum with unusual freedom to photograph what he wanted. He went on to the Museo dell’Automobile, then through San Remo, Monaco, and France, meeting collectors along the way. At Le Mans he used a borrowed telephoto lens he took with him, shot the race with the builder’s eye of someone already thinking about the models that might come from it, and slept curled up in a rental Ford Escort with maybe two hours of rest. The event itself mattered, but so did the documentation, the details, the views from the rear that would help with future decal placement.

(continued with Part II)