OFF THE SHELF: Tony Perrone and the Cars That Stayed With Him

Tony Perrone has spent a lifetime proving that small things can carry enormous weight.

At first glance, his collection is about cars in miniature, hundreds of them, many rendered with astonishing precision, each one polished, placed, and preserved with care. Look a little closer, though, and the collection opens into something larger. It becomes a record of taste, memory, friendship, grief, craftsmanship, and pure delight. It becomes a portrait of a man who never really stopped being fascinated by what an automobile can stir in the heart.

For Tony, that fascination began early and hit hard. He still remembers the pull of the first Corvette, the 1953 model, the one that caught his eye when he was a boy in Hialeah, Florida, and never really let go. Born in May 1947, he was only six years old when that car entered his imagination, but some designs do not wait for maturity to make their case. The Corvette was sleek, dramatic, different from anything else on the road. Tony was hooked. Years later, he would describe the attraction perfectly, saying it drew him “like a moth to a flame.”

That kind of response has shaped the rest of his collecting life. Tony is not the kind of collector who acquires objects simply to complete sets or chase scarcity. He responds to beauty, to detail, to memory, to the emotional charge an object can hold. A model car, in his world, is never just a model car. It can be a technical marvel, a time capsule, a tribute, even a companion to a real-life chapter he wants to keep close.

His earliest route into the hobby was the same one that launched countless collectors of his generation. He built plastic models. Airplanes, tanks, ships, automobiles, whatever he could get his hands on. Still, cars were always the main attraction. Not long after his father found him a promotional model of that beloved 1953 Corvette in 1954, when Tony was seven, he was building car kits himself. AMT and Monogram became familiar names. Their 1:25 scale kits matched the scale of the promo models and gave him a way to participate in the automotive world before he was anywhere near old enough to drive in it.

Then, as happens, the hobby gave ground to life. College came along. So did service in the U.S. Army. Then work after his discharge. The model-building years faded, though not because the interest had disappeared. It was simply waiting, tucked away until another phase of life made room for it again.

When Tony did return, it was with the eye of someone older, sharper, and perhaps more appreciative of what great model-making could achieve. He built a few kits again, including tanks and hot rods, but the real spark came from a different direction. In 1995, a Sunday newspaper ad stopped him cold. Danbury Mint had released a 1925 Ford Model T First Pickup in 1:24 scale. It was close enough to the size of the kits he knew, but it belonged to another realm entirely. This was diecast metal, loaded with detail, executed at a level that made an immediate impression.

Tony recalls that moment with clarity. Looking at the model, he realized he was seeing something he could admire rather than try to outbuild. “I remember thinking that I couldn’t compete with these at my age any longer,” he said. It was less a concession than a conversion experience. He bought the truck, then started digging for everything he could find about the world it came from.

That curiosity led him to Jay Olins and the Diecast Car Collectors Club newsletter, better known as D4C, which chronicled 1:24 scale releases from Danbury Mint and Franklin Mint. For Tony, the discovery was transformative. He had found not just information, but a gathering place for people who cared about the same things he did. They noticed hinge designs. They compared finishes. They debated authenticity. They understood the thrill of a model done right.

Tony quickly became more than a reader. He volunteered to help assemble manufacturing information for the newsletter, joining George Dill in the work. By 1997, he had become Jay’s associate editor. Before long, the club moved online and evolved into the Diecast Zone, where Tony helped moderate discussion and became one of the community’s defining voices. He wrote reviews, staged photo shoots, and created the kind of content collectors returned to, commented on, and archived. His work was informed, enthusiastic, and trusted, the product of a collector who knew how to look closely and explain what mattered. In 2007, Tony was supremely honored to be inducted into the Diecast Zone Hall of Fame, a recognition that meant a great deal to him. But the moment was also touched by sadness, because Jay and George had already passed.

The industry took notice. Franklin Mint and Danbury Mint began sending him new models to review, with the cars themselves serving as compensation. For a serious enthusiast, it was an ideal arrangement and one that helped shape the character of his own collection. It became heavily rooted in the output of those two makers, especially in 1:24 scale, where the Mints reached an extraordinary level of craftsmanship in their prime.

And if there was one subject that suited Tony better than any other, it was the Corvette.

He is a Corvette man in every sense that matters. He owned a new 1972 Corvette Stingray convertible, later a used 1994 Corvette coupe, and then a new 2003 Corvette Z06. His affection for the marque runs through the collection with unmistakable force. But for Tony, Corvette was never just a marque. It was memory in motion. At one point he owned every Corvette model the Mints produced. His enthusiasm no doubt helped move some of them, though as he likes to joke, the car itself is “somewhat popular,” too.

That blend of expertise and affection gave Tony’s reviews special credibility. He did not admire Corvettes abstractly. He knew them from the driver’s seat. He knew the shape of them, the feel of them, the way they lived in memory. So when a Mint Corvette crossed his desk, it was not just another release. It was an event.

Even so, his collecting eye has never been rigid. Corvettes and cars he has owned remain natural candidates for acquisition, but so do models that simply strike his fancy. Over time, as Franklin and Danbury reduced their 1:24 diecast production, Tony’s collection widened to include more 1:43 scale cars. He adapted without losing the sensibility that made the collection his. He still values detail. He still values function. He still responds to excellence.

That word, detail, comes up often when Tony talks about what separates scale replica models from other collectibles. In the golden years of the Mint-produced diecasts, he watched the category rise far beyond the notion of toy cars. Opening doors, hoods, trunks, and fuel filler doors were only the beginning. The real excitement was in the increasingly exact engineering, working suspension, realistic scissor hinges, internally hinged doors, all the mechanical flourishes that made these pieces feel less like static objects and more like faithful mechanical interpretations. Tony admired that ambition. He still does.

For him, the hobby has never belonged to just one emotional lane. Craftsmanship matters. Historical accuracy matters. Nostalgia matters. So does the simple pleasure of seeing a beloved car beautifully rendered in miniature. Tony does not separate those impulses because his collection does not separate them either. Some pieces speak to history. Some to ownership. Some to design. Some to sentiment. All of them answer to feeling.

That helps explain why his interests have never been confined to cars alone. Tony describes himself more as a hobbyist than a curator or historian, and the distinction is telling. He collects with appetite. Alongside his model cars are vintage Gillette safety razors, antique cameras, early Colt firearms, and precision diecast tractors, especially John Deere examples, with others from makers like SpecCast and Universal Hobbies. The common thread is not subject matter. It is appreciation, the instinctive attraction to objects that are well made, evocative, and worth living with.

Still, among all the precision and rarity, the most meaningful pieces in Tony’s collection are not necessarily the most famous. They are the ones that carry personal history.

Two of the most treasured are tied to his late best friend, Ric Newman, a fellow Diecast Zone member. While Ric was battling cancer, Tony arranged for Danbury Mint to create an exact duplicate of Ric’s 1965 Corvette Stingray convertible in Goldwood Yellow. It was a surprise, and a deeply personal one. Neither Mint had ever made that model in that specific color as a convertible.

Ric was touched by the gesture, then answered it with one of his own, commissioning a recreation of Tony’s first Corvette, a 1972 Stingray convertible in Ontario Orange Firemist, another combination never officially issued by the Mints. The two models stand as something more than collectibles. They are tokens of friendship made tangible, proof that shared passions can produce acts of real tenderness.

Another car in the collection carries an even heavier emotional load. Tony’s daughter Heather loved Corvette rides in his first Corvette. They were close, and her love of cars mirrored his own. In July 2003, Heather and her husband Henry were killed in an automobile accident. The loss devastated him. In the wake of that grief, Tony’s wife suggested a new Corvette as a way to honor Heather’s memory. He bought a new 2003 50th Anniversary Z06 in Millennial Yellow, the color he believed she would have chosen.

For Tony, the 2003 Z06 was never just a late-life performance car. It was bound up with the memory of the 1972 Stingray he and Heather had loved first, making the newer Corvette feel less like a replacement than a continuation. Driving it made him smile again. Then, in a gesture that feels quintessentially Tony, he purchased the matching Franklin Mint 1:24 Z06 and even switched it to chrome wheels to match the full-size car. Some collectors acquire duplicates to increase value. Tony did it to keep memory exact.

Even Tony’s personal Corvette website carried that thread of remembrance, centering the 2003 Z06 not simply as a prized car, but as part of an ongoing bond between father, daughter, and the Corvette that had first captured them both.

Of course, there are rarities, too, the sort that collectors dream about. He owns prototypes, first-number issues, and a lone existing color sample of Danbury Mint’s 1959 Corvette in Crown Sapphire, given to him by the company’s design manager, who had become a close friend. He also treasures a 1:18 Exoto Cobra Daytona coupe #15 signed by both Carroll Shelby and Dan Gurney. Shelby’s autograph required a donation to his Children’s Fund. Gurney’s required patience. The model reportedly sat on Gurney’s desk for nearly two months while he recovered from a broken wrist, and his secretary told Tony that he would often pick up the car and admire it with his good hand. For Tony, that anecdote is part of the artifact. Story and object are inseparable.

Today, his collection numbers around 400 diecast models, including roughly 161 Mint 1:24 Corvettes, the largest single segment by far. He has given them room worthy of their importance. Shelves he made when the house was first finished hold the Corvette models, each in its own AMT plastic case. Other diecasts rest in drawers, glass-front cabinets, and carefully distributed spaces upstairs, downstairs, and in the basement. The arrangement suggests not only pride, but intimacy. Tony knows these cars. He knows where they belong. He knows what each one means.

He also knows what the hobby has asked of him over time. The word that comes to mind most readily is patience. Patience in finding the model. Patience in buying it. Patience in deciding where it belongs. Patience in preserving it over the years. That rhythm seems to suit him now. After 45 years in the commercial casualty insurance industry, Tony retired in 2012. Retirement gave him more time for the hobby, though in a quieter way than during his review-writing years. These days, the pace is easier. The passion remains.

If there is one misconception he would like to correct, it is the old assumption that scale replica models are simply toys. Tony knows better. At the top end of the hobby, these are feats of design and manufacturing, objects of astonishing fidelity that deserve to be looked at seriously. But for all the technical excellence, the reason the hobby has remained meaningful to him is not only the product. It is the people. The car lovers. The model aficionados. The collectors he found when he once suspected no such community could possibly exist.

That may be the real heart of Tony’s story. Yes, his collection is Corvette-centric. Yes, it leans heavily into the 1930s and 1940s beyond that. But what he has really built is something richer than an inventory. It is a lived archive of fascination, fellowship, and feeling. A shelf of memories. A garage of stories. A life, in scale.

In Tony’s world, the smallest cars often carry the longest roads.