The Story

Eventually we looked at Kentucky, my dad grew up on a farm not far from Tompkinsville, Kentucky.  He joined the US Army and left to defend the Eastern Seaboard from Nazi invasion.  Eventually the war ended and after several adventures, he moved to California.  As a young man he used to plow fields, using a mule to pull the plow.  As a middle aged man, he worked on the Saturn V rockets that took the Apollo astronauts to the Moon.

I was born in Southern California and at age three I got my first army men, MPC ring hand figures.  I still have two of them in my collection.  Unlike many young men, I never gave up collecting toy soldiers, and when I went to college, I lived at home so my mom could not toss them out.  When I went to the Army, I was living with my wife and she knew better than to toss them out!

After over 55 years of buying, making, and collecting my armies, they were taking up a lot of space. It filled a two car garage and three on-site storage sheds.  I knew retirement would require either a massive downsizing, or a massive new location.  My plan was to be able to store the whole collection under one climate controlled roof.