Eric Haselhorst, 41, of Dodge City, Kan., recalls watching custom harvesting crews moving south through Kansas in May signaling that harvest was about a month away. “I’ve always had a fascination with custom harvesting crews,” he says. “These are guys and gals who travel from Texas to Canada harvesting wheat for farmers.” 
Every June, he spent time on his granddad’s farm helping with the harvest. “I rode for hours on the armrest of his M2 Gleaner, made many trips to the co-op with a load on the ’71 GMC, ate meals out of the trunk of Grandma’s car and at the end of the day, washed off the dirt and dust and started over the next day.”
Making Models
Seven years ago he changed jobs and moved from Great Bend, Kan., to Dodge City. His wife, Christina and three children, Allison, 11, Matthew, 15, and Kara, 8, often accompany him on summer weekends to find custom cutter crews in action to photograph and take video of them. 
At his new residence, he no longer had space to display a collection of four-wheel-drive vehicles. He traded some of them at a toy show for a couple of semis and combines, grain trailers and dollies. 
To complete the set, he wanted a double combine trailer but couldn’t find one. “I got some measurements from a custom cutter in Minnesota and made one out of brass. People said they’d love to have one so I started making them.”
He enjoyed making them so much that he started making single combine trailers. That was followed by tandem-axle end dump trucks.  
At first, he never said no to anything anyone wanted him to build but he soon realized that took the fun out of it and he wasn’t doing his best work.  He decided to focus on wheat harvest vehicles only. “What is nice about being specialized is all pressure is off to do work I don’t care about. Staying true to what I absolutely love doing is the best part,” he says. He readily refers customers to other builders who specialize in items that he doesn’t do. 
Organized as Rockin H Farm Toys in 2012, he not only assembles the model to the customer’s requirements, he also sells kits that the customer, if he likes, can put together himself. He includes step-by-step videos and photos on his web site, rockinhfarmtoys.com, which helps them assemble it.

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Victor Hugo, the famous French author of “Les Misérables,” once wrote, “Each man should frame life so that, at some future hour, fact and his dreaming meet.” Clark Wade of Tucker, Ga., might be the poster child for Hugo’s whimsical quote.
Clark, at age 4, began dreaming on a big scale. “I had a couple of Smith-Miller GMCs then, and I wondered how super it would be if other truck brands were made in model or toy form. I had an imaginary friend, George, who lived on an imaginary street and had all kinds of imaginary toy trucks and construction equipment. When my parents, John and Eleanor Wade, asked me where George lived, I said, ‘Fumby Street,’” he said. The real Fumby Street was a farmer’s access path to the fields behind the houses on the street where Clark grew up. Years later, Clark’s childhood dream and his present-day reality would collide.
One of Clark’s oldest memories is getting a Smith-Miller Mobil gas tanker for his third birthday. “I played with trucks and construction equipment constantly as a kid and had quite a number of them—Smith-Millers, Doepke, Nylint, Tonka, Wyandotte, Structo, but sadly, I have none of the originals today. My parents were some of the great, Guinness Record holders, thrower-outers of all time,” he said.
As a teen, Clark built a lot of plastic model kits, mostly cars. But in 1987, he became a serious collector of mid-century 1/12 and 1/16 scale trucks and construction toys. “I was helping Sarah, my wife, clean her mother’s basement and found a few old toys there, including a Doepke ladder truck and a Marx six-wheel Army truck. Then, boing! I was hooked again. I became an adult collector that day, and 30 years later, I’m still just as excited about model trucks as I was on that special day,” he said.

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This large collection of scale model trucks is smartly displayed in Michael’s Trucking garage. Display shelves go from floor to ceiling. Available wall space is adorned with license plates from all 50 states and truck memorabilia.

As they say in the trucking business, “Once a trucker, always a trucker.” And so it is with Michael Alamorian, a trucker for life. For Michael, trucking began at a young age. “My early play toys were Tonka and Hubley trucks. They took a beating under heavy play in the yard. Many did not survive. I especially liked the Winross trucks with realistic and popular common carrier logos. I complained to my dad because they lacked detail. A few basic features, including; windows, exhaust and breather stacks along with mud flaps would have made them more realistic. Dad stopped buying those and switched to Motorific models. These trucks were cool as they had realistic F-700 Mack COE and Gindy exterior post van trailers. As a kid, trucks were my favorites, for which I had many. Trucks that survived those youthful workdays in the yard have been passed along to my children. I still have several Hess trucks in mint condition. They were gifts from my parents and now stored away in safekeeping,” Michael reflected. His discretionary taste at this young age would serve Michael well late in life. 
Those long playful hours operating toy trucks became Michael’s passion for the road beasts that transport our country’s goods. Michael commented, “While still quite young, my neighbor, John Pagano, hauled steel with a 1970 Mack Model R700L Western and composite Transcraft flatbed trailer. This well-equipped rig was all black with a red frame and running gear. It had a polished aluminum Mercury sleeper, a 500-hp V-8 Mack engine and a 16-speed Spicer transmission with New Way air ride. I always admired John’s truck and often helped wash it on weekends. Finally, on my 13th birthday, John took me on a trip to Chicago. With that experience, I was hooked on trucks for good. John later taught me how to drive his truck.

Hobby Launch
​Although Michael had a deep passion for trucks, he would never have dreamed of a hobby with highly customized replicas. “As an admirer of large commercial trucks I began assembling 1:25 scale styrene plastic truck models. My first kit was a Peterbilt Model 359 made by AMT in 1969. I faithfully collected and assembled AMT kits until 1978 when Monogram released the 1:32 scale Snaptite replica truck line. I next transitioned into 1:34 scale die-cast trucks built by First Gear. With their high detail, these became nicer display models.  
“My current collection numbers over 450 pieces, primarily First Gear units. When First Gear’s new tooling releases began to slow in 2009, I switched to customizing their stock units. I typically disassemble the First Gear truck and swap parts to replicate actual trucks I had driven or worked around,” he stated.

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Nearly the first thing Rueben Alfaro admitted was, “All of my collection is for sale. I do not collect anything for me to actually keep, but I do enjoy displaying at the shows. People see what a large variety of antique toys I have and comment, ‘Oh, what a nice collection.’ What they don’t realize is—it’s all for sale. Everything I buy, I put it all into inventory.”
Alfaro took an unusual route to collecting and selling vintage model toys. “I grew up in the small Midwestern town of Galesburg, Ill., one of 11 children. Father worked in a factory and my mother worked as a nurse’s aide in a nursing home.” Growing up poor and with so many mouths to feed, Alfaro quickly learned that toys were nonessential things that sometimes appeared at Christmas or on birthdays and “sometimes not even then.” 
Alfaro said, “We were poor and didn’t have lots of extras. I played with neighbor boys’ toys. They seemed to have plenty of toys. I remember those toys, but since they were not my toys, I do not have any model toys from childhood. However a while back, I purchased a really nice Buddy L turquoise dump truck with the shovel that had been restored. It has not sold yet and I don’t mind. I remember my neighbor friend had a truck like this when we were kids, so it reminds me of my childhood.” 
As an adult, Alfaro more or less fell into buying and selling toys. “I first collected coins for quite a few years. I started toy collecting in the fall of 1994. I had gone to Kmart family shopping night and picked out two 1994 Holiday Barbie dolls as Christmas presents for our granddaughters. About this time I was introduced to online auctions and started looking at eBay out of curiosity. I noticed the same Barbie dolls that I had just purchased were also selling on eBay for more money than I had paid for them in Kmart. This shocked me. I couldn’t understand why people were paying more for the same doll when it was still available at local stores at the manufacturer’s issue price. That’s the day I discovered the secondary toy market!” 

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There was a time in the Northeast when you could easily find at least one or two toy shows a month to attend. John Carlisle would organize a few shows in this area, plus there were a lot of smaller shows in various halls. All of these shows, for the most part, have disappeared. 

​That lust for the so-called “limited-edition die-cast models” has cooled off. Now, we have the true antique toy collectors, and the hard-core promotional model collectors chasing those hard-to-get DCP and old Winross models. 

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Richard Walter has spent his career riding the roads across America in Kenworth trucks. He found his passion for collecting model Kenworths in 2001. He’d had a few before that, but meeting a fellow truck enthusiast fired up his fervor.
“I was living in Michigan when I met a guy at a truck show. I had a decal from my truck from the Netherlands,” he said, explaining in his lightly accented English that he’d lived in the Netherlands for 18 years, spending three of those years driving trucks. As coincidence would have it, Richard’s new acquaintance was also from the Netherlands. “I never spoke Dutch here but I could talk to this guy. We talked about collecting.”
That conversation also sparked a trading connection of Kenworths. “I got all my European trucks from him,” said Richard who supplemented his new friend’s collection with American models. The European trucks that came his way are DAF and Scania, among his favorites on the shelves in the bedroom converted to a Kenworth mini-museum in the Chubbuck, Idaho, home he shares with his wife, Diny. DAF, Europe’s fastest-growing truck manufacturer, goes back to 1928. Two brothers, Hub and Wim van Doorne started the company, which was known as Van Doorne’s Aanhangwagen Fabriek, hence the DAF. In 1948, the acronym remained for this company now headquartered in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, but has since then been known as Van Doorne’s Automobiel Fabriek. 
Scania, now a global company, has its head office as well as its research and development offices in Södertälje, Sweden. It produced its first truck in 1902.
Kenworth is a PACCAR company. PACCAR also makes Peterbilt and DAF. The Kenworth subsidiary, Kenworth Truck Company, builds premium commercial vehicles for sale in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Australia and for export throughout the world. Kenworth model toys are made by a variety of companies.
Though DAFs and Scanias may be favorites, Richard collects any brand of Kenworth product, enhancing his 500-piece truck collection with brochures, posters, hats, T-shirts, flags, belt buckles, cup holders, license plates, knives, boxer shorts and other singular items. They fill the shelves and walls and creep across the ceiling with overflow taking pride of place in the garage. He also has about 20-30 truck-themed movies and three photo albums of pictures he’s taken of other drivers’ trucks.
His Kenworth brochure collection is complete. He has every one back to the 1950s. They’re a great source of information about the Kenworth line. 
“When I started, I didn’t know anything. I found magazines, studied ads and web sites,” he said, though he admits he doesn’t know how to turn on the computer. He’s learned to look for online sources of Kenworths and information about them, Diny helps with that, but he’d really much rather find them at toy shows on his truck route from Idaho to Michigan, Texas and Utah. He wishes he ran in Ohio so he could take in the Kirtland Die-cast Collectible Toy and Model Show. “You never know what you’re going to find at the shows,” he said.

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