Off the Shelf: John Kuvakas and a Lifelong Love of Cars

The first time John Kuvakas fell in love with a car, he wasn’t old enough to reach a door handle.

He was just going on three when his parents bought a house on the better side of town. His dad had a good job then, and one day he came home with a 1956 Pontiac Catalina two-door hardtop, the kind of car that didn’t just arrive, it announced itself. John remembers stepping out the front door, locking onto that Pontiac like it was the only object in the world.

“My dad said that I pointed at it and I said, ‘Pontiac.’” John laughed when he told it. “And my older cousins have told me that ever since I was able to talk, I could identify cars.”

That detail matters because it frames everything that came after: John didn’t learn to notice cars. He noticed cars first and then the rest of life organized itself around that.

Not long after that Catalina moment, John’s dad lost his job, and the family moved in with John’s grandfather on the east side of Youngstown. The move could have been a hard turn in the story, but for John, it became the beginning of a routine that shaped his childhood and, oddly enough, the core logic of his collecting decades later.

His grandfather would walk him to the local plaza “two blocks away, two or three times a week.” They’d get groceries, then they’d stop at Woolworths. John was around four, and Woolworths held treasure.

One day, his grandfather bought him a big plastic bag filled with little plastic cars by Renwal. “Very rudimentary,” John said. “But I think there were 50 of them in there, and they had the names of the cars on the back. Plymouth. Chevrolet.”

To anyone else, those would be cheap toys. To John, it was a fleet—an instant city. He didn’t just play with them; he organized them. He’d line them up. He’d build little scenes on the floor, from car lots, to downtown streets, and supermarkets, using interlocking blocks as buildings. And as weeks went on, his grandfather would buy another bag, and then another. Fifty became a hundred, then a hundred-fifty, then two hundred.

And then someone gave him a Corgi. Most kids would’ve treated it like a promotion: heavier, more detailed, more “real.” John hated it. “It was so much bigger than the other cars,” he said. “I couldn’t put them in my little dioramas.”

Listen closely to what’s happening there. A four-year-old wasn’t arguing about brand loyalty or horsepower or paint codes. He was arguing about scale—before he even had the word for it. “So, for me,” he told me, “my initial motivation was scale. I didn’t realize it at the time. I didn’t want cars that weren’t the same size because they didn’t look right.” That one sentence is basically the thesis statement for John’s collecting life: if it doesn’t look right, it isn’t right.

By seven, John moved into model kits like AMT and Monogram, the classic builders’ brands. His dad had a workbench downstairs. John built, learned, upgraded. By ten he wanted more paints, more tools. So he started mowing lawns and washing cars at eleven for spending money. It was the first hint of a pattern he’d repeat for decades. If something was worth caring about, it was worth working for.

Then life accelerated. From nineteen to thirty-one, John moved frequently for work, keeping things light, not because the interest went away but because adulthood doesn’t always give your passions a proper shelf. The models didn’t vanish from his identity; they simply went dormant, waiting for the moment he’d settle down long enough to let the hobby grow roots. That moment came in Virginia.

John eventually found himself running a Ford dealership in the area, an outcome that, in hindsight, feels less like a career choice and more like gravity. “I quit college and got into retail,” he told me, “I wanted to sell cars.” Why? “Because I love cars.”

His first break came through sales, but not cars at first. He sold t-shirts and jeans, then fast food, then boats and campers. That’s where he learned he could sell high-ticket items comfortably. A customer who’d bought two boats from him ran a car dealership and offered him a desk: “We’ll see what can happen.” In the early ’80s, the dealership changed everything. “Things clicked,” he said.

From there, he climbed from sales manager to general manager quickly. He ran dealerships for years, even working with two Washington Redskins players as apprentices in the business. He toured manufacturers. He saw advanced design sketches years ahead of production. He talked with designers. He lived in that ecosystem where cars aren’t appliances, but stories, objects with intention.

And that’s where the adult version of the hobby re-entered, this time through detail. John picked up a few larger-scale diecast pieces from the Mints and loved them because they had the opening features and the accuracy. But they took up space, space that John didn’t have. Then his truck manager at the dealership walked into his office, set a small box on his desk, and told him to open it.

Out came a Brooklin Models 1967 Shelby, blue, heavy in the hand. “I’d never seen anything that small that was that well detailed,” John said. “I was just blown away.”

That was the hook. Soon he was in Amer’s Hobby Shop back in Youngstown, staring at more Brooklins, and buying a 1958 Pontiac pace car convertible. He paid $65, “crazy money for a scale model,” he admitted, and didn’t even want to tell his wife. But that purchase did what the first plastic bag did when he was four: it opened a gate.

(Former site of Amer’s Hobby Shop in Youngstown, Ohio, which closed in 2015)

He put the 1:24 scale cars away and started collecting white metal. What drew him wasn’t merely nostalgia, it was fidelity. Accuracy. Craft. The idea that you could hold an entire car in your hand and still see the design logic, the proportions, the stance.

He had the models, but he didn’t yet have the community. That changed at a local show, where he met other collectors and, importantly, saw the hobby’s full ecosystem of dealers, makers, small-run pieces, the whole spectrum. He also had some early experiences with collector circles that, frankly, weren’t fun—too much ego, too much sniping. John had spent decades in car sales and dealership management; he can handle sharp elbows. He just didn’t want to. “I was looking for a hobby,” he told me. “I was looking to enjoy myself.”

By then, John had already made one of the biggest shifts of his adult life. At 50 years old, he stepped into the ministry. The hobby didn’t get left behind, though. It came with him, and it quietly reinforced what he was becoming known for, creating spaces where people feel welcome.

(John displays some of his models in his pastoral office)

So he gravitated toward the people who made it enjoyable. He found the guys who could argue about casting quality and still laugh over pizza. He found the ones who cared deeply but didn’t turn it into a contest. And that’s where John’s story takes a turn that’s easy to miss if you only look at the models on the shelves.

At some point, John stopped being only a collector and became something like a connector. He went to the Chicago show in 2007 and saw what these gatherings could be: not just transactions, but reunions. A year later, he got a table near the concession stand and created a simple concept: a place to put coats, drink coffee, sit down, and talk. Call it hospitality. Call it community infrastructure. Either way, it worked and then it grew. He added another table. He helped make space for others. He helped turn a show into a shared ritual.

You can feel his motivations in the way he talks about it: the collecting matters, but the sharing matters more than he expected. “I don’t know what I like better,” he admitted. “Because I really enjoyed the recent days we spent in Miami just being with everybody.”

That same impulse pushed him into YouTube. It started with some unboxing videos of random products sent by a Chinese manufacturer looking to make inroads in the US. While he liked making the videos, the product quality was poor and he didn’t want his name attached. Then his wife Kelly, a professional photographer, nudged him toward what he actually cared about. Why not do videos of his models? The channel grew because John wasn’t chasing clicks; he was offering something the hobby needed: clear-eyed reviews, context, and an honest love of craftsmanship. Manufacturers noticed. Dealers noticed. Collectors noticed.

And through it all, his collecting philosophy stayed consistent from that four-year-old on the floor with plastic cars. If there’s a theme to his collection, it isn’t a decade or a brand or race cars versus sedans. “It’s fidelity—accuracy—minuteness of detail,” he says confidently.

(This Stamp model has special meaning as it’s an exact replica of the car he picked up Kelly for their first date.)

That’s why he gets enthralled by high-end pieces that can survive a camera zoom without falling apart. That’s why he appreciates a great casting even if the factory execution is thick paint and missing trim, because he can see the underlying truth of the shape. And it’s why he’s surprisingly unromantic about owning.

He’s got around 400 models on hand right now, he estimates, but only wants to keep about 50. The rest are fluid—buy, enjoy, pass along. He learned long ago that collecting for him doesn’t have to mean hoarding. The joy is in the appreciation, the evaluation, the story and then letting someone else take their turn with it.

In the end, John’s life makes a clean, satisfying loop. The kid who walked out of his front door and saw beauty in a Pontiac grew into the man who built a career around the real thing—selling cars, managing dealerships, living close to design and motion and that feeling of a machine moving underneath you. And then, when adulthood finally allowed him to settle, he returned to the small versions, not as toys, but as concentrated expressions of the thing he’s always loved.

“When I look at my little cars,” he tells me, “that’s what I think about.”

That’s the secret. John doesn’t collect miniatures to replace real cars. He collects them to keep the feeling close—scaled down, yes, but never diminished. The detail isn’t just craftsmanship. It's a memory. It’s imagination. It’s the same instinct that made a three-year-old point at a Catalina and name it correctly, like he was recognizing something he’d been waiting for.