Joshua Lionel Cowen, a New York inventor, started toy trains rolling in 1900 with a single flatcar powered by primitive batteries. There was nothing wrong with it, except it was just plain dirty.''Īt that time, the Lionel company had just floundered through the Depression. I just picked up everything- track and transformer and three more cars-carried it home, cleaned it up and took it apart. I thought, `Well, they`re throwing it out, and the trash man`s going to pick it up anyway,` so I took it out of the barrel and there was another car underneath it. I saw a toy train sticking out of the top of one pile, a Lionel.
''It was trash day,'' he recalled, ''and all the trash barrels were out in front of the houses. It all started one afternoon in 1936, as 7-year-old Richard Kughn walked home from George Washington Elementary School in Cleveland. ''I still approached it like a business deal,'' Kughn said, ''but there was a lot of excitement on my part because it was Lionel.'' When the opportunity to buy Lionel came up two years ago, Kughn examined the possibility with hard eyes, even though he had been in love with the trains for 50 years and had wondered, even as a child, how it might be to walk into his own Lionel factory and pluck off the assembly line any accessory he wanted. Kughn can collect so many valuable things because he and his real estate colleagues rarely find themselves on a river in a leaky canoe. Buttons and belt buckles scratch!'' Or, ''Like the other fella`s wife-I`m nice to look at, but do not touch.'' Visitors, however, are permitted to gaze upon his antique cars-including three mint-condition Duesenbergs and a 1939 Lincoln once used by King George V of England-but each vehicle wears a little cautionary sign on the windshield: ''Unless you are in the NUDE, please do not lean on this car. Kughn makes Carail available to a variety of organizations-he belongs to 30 civic and charitable groups himself-and he doesn`t want cocktail party guests trampling on any part of his precious collection. A Christmas tree dominated another corner, but no electric train chugged around its base. Recessed lighting fixtures circling above the conference table had been decorated with model locomotives. In the area of Carail where Kughn conducted business that day, a large bar dominated a corner of the room.
0 kommentar(er)
