Daytrading toy soldiers pt 2 of 2
Just like one doing regular day-trading of stocks, I made bad picks and barely broke even or even lost on some. Frequently I made I made several times what I paid. I even kept a couple things I never would have considered buying, partially because some things were not available when I was a kid and were, I have to say it, sort of cool.
Who bought the items I sold on ebay? I sold to a few dozen folk, mostly to guys in small towns across the US. Some people bought multiple items. One buyer I looked up on the ebay community page was a goth woman in Pennsylvania (well the person in the picture looked like a woman). One item made its way to Athens (Greece, not Ohio or Georgia) and another to lower Manhattan—I looked up the address on googlemap photo: it was a sketchy warehouse near the East River. Ebay maintains feedback on sellers and buyers so a buyer can see if they can trust some stranger to send something after the buyer sends payment. Their feedback and sometimes follow up emails included comments like these about their purchases:
Great set of figures!
I’ve collected these since I was a kid. I’ve always wanted this one.
Rare piece, thanks!
Do you have any more?
With comments like that, I realized I was not just making some extra cash, I was making someone quite pleased.
One can sit back and make snide assumptions about the folks that collect such things. I know because I did. The basic assumption for male collectors is a guy wearing glasses, in his 40s, either scarily skinny or quite heavy, living with his mother in the house he grew up in, going to work every day in boring brown and tan clothes, perhaps wearing hush puppies, and coming home to the basement to be with his things, having abandoned the possibility of sex back in high school when he observed that apparently only assholes ever got laid. He might have several cats that are forever knocking over his soldiers. The female collector has also taken vows of chastity to pursue her passion for her prize possessions. In both cases a degree of obsessive compulsive is assumed, as well as some social awkwardness and a general unattractiveness. Sometimes the men might have considered ordering a bride from Thailand or the Philippines but figured mother would kick them out of the house. Sometimes the women read romance novels by the pound to fulfill similar needs. Cruel stereotypes but like all stereotypes they have to have some basis in reality.
I wondered what the guys were like, so I tried to find places that sold this kind of stuff today. When I was a kid, you frequently found model kits in the local drug store in the toy aisle or in a general hobby store in each mall. No longer, as I mentioned before in the current tyranny of retail catering to the young, pretty, and trendy. So a search for hobby stores revealed their scattered presence in obscure outposts in outer suburbs, in strip malls with bargain basement rents. While on an errand, I made bit of a detour to visit one of the hobby stores.
I walked into the store. What’s there? Remote control planes and cars. Model kits of cars, planes, and ships and the assorted glues and paints associated with them. Sets of fantasy figures. Model train sets. Slot cars. Art and craft supplies. Collectible die-cast toys of cars, planes, and tanks. Basically the same as 35 years ago, without any evidence of computers’ addition to the world apart from the cash register. The cool thing about it all was that everything was hands on: you had to assemble the models and the train sets, manipulate the remote control toys; move the game pieces with your hands; place the slot cars on the tracks and hold the accelerator in your hand. There were no screens, no displays, no keyboards.
Who’s there? Every boy that got picked on and ignored in school, twenty years later. Some actually had a female significant other looking through the puzzles and games. The staff were very helpful, discussing with one customer the certain likelihood that some models of remote control airplanes will probably crash and with another the availability of a new train accessory. And to stomp on my assumptions about the sexless life of the hobby enthusiast, one man was saying to the staff that he was going away for the weekend to see his son graduate from Bucknell University. As he was alone, I didn’t see if his wife was from Manila or Bangkok.
Initially, I planned to sell almost everything I ran across at my folk’s apartment. I sold a good bit of the soldiers, especially larger ones. But then I remembered playing with some of them as a child. The skirmishes on crumpled bedspreads, the assault by the commandos on the nearly impregnable couch, the campaign to liberate the living room culminating in the last stand by the legs of the coffee table. So I saved some. I even bought a couple things—we’re talking $3.00 here, less than a beer—because nothing like it was available when I was a kid. I once saw scribbled on the wall of a youth hostel the following: “Its never too late to have a happy childhood.” Mine was fine, but it never hurts to improve things, does it?
I live in a place where everyone is an expert. Specialists in everything from agriculture to the military to education. After a while I accepted that these toy soldier folk are true experts. Granted, no matter how well someone’s reviews of Medieval Russian soldiers are, there is no General Walter Mitty Professor at Toy soldier U for him. No one is likely to become a fellow at the Military Miniature Institute. These folk enjoy their work in the field for the pure pleasure of doing it. There are few books on the subjects, as no publisher prints a book that few will ever buy and read, except for second rate university presses, which can depend at least upon sales to the professors students for classes and some university library sales. So the web is the forum for the toy soldier enthusiasts. There are forums, with avatars/images of tanks and soldiers and planes, but limited traffic.
I find myself walking on the razors edge between the socially acceptable life of the commonplace work and social pursuits on one hand and the absorbing geekdom of a toy soldier fiend on the other. If a person studies the commonplace academic pursuits to the point of becoming a professor, they will study and write about a subject matter that few will know, understand, or care about. Much like the toy soldier enthusiasts that I did business with. I had respect before for the professor, and now have it for the military miniature collector.
The last of the soldiers I bought for day-trading are up for auction as I type this, odds and ends included in other batches, orphans of the toy soldier world. I have kept one soldier from an assortment of soldiers I day traded: a tin WWII soldier sitting with his hands reaching in his shirt pocket. He’s a little over an inch long. His uniform is painted green while his boots, belt, canteen, and rifle are painted brown. His face and hands are the bright tan color sold in paint canisters in hobby shops as “flesh”—evidently soldiers are never brown are black. He’s resting his left hand on his crossed legs. He’s reaching his right hand in his shirt’s left pocket for something, which I assume is a pack of cigarettes. Though many point at old movies being the agent for spreading smoking in the US, I think it would be hard to top WWII as the engine that made smoking pervasive. Soldiers’ rations included a pack of cigarettes. By the end of the war, nearly every soldier and sailor smoked, and when he came home he got his future wife to smoke too. My tin soldier is reaching for a smoke.
He is sitting on the stand of our computer’s speakers, ignoring me as I type. He was created by a company long gone several decades ago. Someone came up with the idea, someone else created the mold. A boy received it as a present probably in a set with other soldiers. No doubt pissed that this guy was just sitting around, not shooting or doing anything else cool, the kid kept the sitting soldier at the bottom of the box and never played with him (I assume so, as the details painted on him are still intact after many decades.) Somehow he got mixed in with the set I bought to sell. The small toy soldier is not shooting nor marching, just relaxing with legs crossed, reaching not for glory but for a smoke.
He reminds me of something one of my favorite writers said when I heard him speak over a dozen years ago. Kurt Vonnegut created the eyes, the humor, and world view of many people of my vintage and before, acting as the priest of the bemused alienation of the young. Vonnegut was a veteran of World War II, his experiences in the war inspiring much of his novel Slaughterhouse Five. When I saw him in a university auditorium, the young students were curious about him, no doubt, but were not waiting on his every word with the expectation and worship of those in their 30s, 40s and 50s who read all his books when young. He has since published much of what he said in that and probably many lectures in his last book, A Man Without a Country. He told a tale of some tasks he did on a daily basis, going to the store to get an envelope and some paper, going to the post office to mail a letter. From the rambling story, which, coming from him, glorified the mundane and made it funny and epic, he concluded that we’re basically here to fart around. Not exactly soaring graduation speech rhetoric. The tin soldier would make Vonnegut proud. So, to commemorate the writer’s ethos and memory, my tin soldier, quietly avoiding the complications and worry of war, is now named Kurt.
Who bought the items I sold on ebay? I sold to a few dozen folk, mostly to guys in small towns across the US. Some people bought multiple items. One buyer I looked up on the ebay community page was a goth woman in Pennsylvania (well the person in the picture looked like a woman). One item made its way to Athens (Greece, not Ohio or Georgia) and another to lower Manhattan—I looked up the address on googlemap photo: it was a sketchy warehouse near the East River. Ebay maintains feedback on sellers and buyers so a buyer can see if they can trust some stranger to send something after the buyer sends payment. Their feedback and sometimes follow up emails included comments like these about their purchases:
Great set of figures!
I’ve collected these since I was a kid. I’ve always wanted this one.
Rare piece, thanks!
Do you have any more?
With comments like that, I realized I was not just making some extra cash, I was making someone quite pleased.
One can sit back and make snide assumptions about the folks that collect such things. I know because I did. The basic assumption for male collectors is a guy wearing glasses, in his 40s, either scarily skinny or quite heavy, living with his mother in the house he grew up in, going to work every day in boring brown and tan clothes, perhaps wearing hush puppies, and coming home to the basement to be with his things, having abandoned the possibility of sex back in high school when he observed that apparently only assholes ever got laid. He might have several cats that are forever knocking over his soldiers. The female collector has also taken vows of chastity to pursue her passion for her prize possessions. In both cases a degree of obsessive compulsive is assumed, as well as some social awkwardness and a general unattractiveness. Sometimes the men might have considered ordering a bride from Thailand or the Philippines but figured mother would kick them out of the house. Sometimes the women read romance novels by the pound to fulfill similar needs. Cruel stereotypes but like all stereotypes they have to have some basis in reality.
I wondered what the guys were like, so I tried to find places that sold this kind of stuff today. When I was a kid, you frequently found model kits in the local drug store in the toy aisle or in a general hobby store in each mall. No longer, as I mentioned before in the current tyranny of retail catering to the young, pretty, and trendy. So a search for hobby stores revealed their scattered presence in obscure outposts in outer suburbs, in strip malls with bargain basement rents. While on an errand, I made bit of a detour to visit one of the hobby stores.
I walked into the store. What’s there? Remote control planes and cars. Model kits of cars, planes, and ships and the assorted glues and paints associated with them. Sets of fantasy figures. Model train sets. Slot cars. Art and craft supplies. Collectible die-cast toys of cars, planes, and tanks. Basically the same as 35 years ago, without any evidence of computers’ addition to the world apart from the cash register. The cool thing about it all was that everything was hands on: you had to assemble the models and the train sets, manipulate the remote control toys; move the game pieces with your hands; place the slot cars on the tracks and hold the accelerator in your hand. There were no screens, no displays, no keyboards.
Who’s there? Every boy that got picked on and ignored in school, twenty years later. Some actually had a female significant other looking through the puzzles and games. The staff were very helpful, discussing with one customer the certain likelihood that some models of remote control airplanes will probably crash and with another the availability of a new train accessory. And to stomp on my assumptions about the sexless life of the hobby enthusiast, one man was saying to the staff that he was going away for the weekend to see his son graduate from Bucknell University. As he was alone, I didn’t see if his wife was from Manila or Bangkok.
Initially, I planned to sell almost everything I ran across at my folk’s apartment. I sold a good bit of the soldiers, especially larger ones. But then I remembered playing with some of them as a child. The skirmishes on crumpled bedspreads, the assault by the commandos on the nearly impregnable couch, the campaign to liberate the living room culminating in the last stand by the legs of the coffee table. So I saved some. I even bought a couple things—we’re talking $3.00 here, less than a beer—because nothing like it was available when I was a kid. I once saw scribbled on the wall of a youth hostel the following: “Its never too late to have a happy childhood.” Mine was fine, but it never hurts to improve things, does it?
I live in a place where everyone is an expert. Specialists in everything from agriculture to the military to education. After a while I accepted that these toy soldier folk are true experts. Granted, no matter how well someone’s reviews of Medieval Russian soldiers are, there is no General Walter Mitty Professor at Toy soldier U for him. No one is likely to become a fellow at the Military Miniature Institute. These folk enjoy their work in the field for the pure pleasure of doing it. There are few books on the subjects, as no publisher prints a book that few will ever buy and read, except for second rate university presses, which can depend at least upon sales to the professors students for classes and some university library sales. So the web is the forum for the toy soldier enthusiasts. There are forums, with avatars/images of tanks and soldiers and planes, but limited traffic.
I find myself walking on the razors edge between the socially acceptable life of the commonplace work and social pursuits on one hand and the absorbing geekdom of a toy soldier fiend on the other. If a person studies the commonplace academic pursuits to the point of becoming a professor, they will study and write about a subject matter that few will know, understand, or care about. Much like the toy soldier enthusiasts that I did business with. I had respect before for the professor, and now have it for the military miniature collector.
The last of the soldiers I bought for day-trading are up for auction as I type this, odds and ends included in other batches, orphans of the toy soldier world. I have kept one soldier from an assortment of soldiers I day traded: a tin WWII soldier sitting with his hands reaching in his shirt pocket. He’s a little over an inch long. His uniform is painted green while his boots, belt, canteen, and rifle are painted brown. His face and hands are the bright tan color sold in paint canisters in hobby shops as “flesh”—evidently soldiers are never brown are black. He’s resting his left hand on his crossed legs. He’s reaching his right hand in his shirt’s left pocket for something, which I assume is a pack of cigarettes. Though many point at old movies being the agent for spreading smoking in the US, I think it would be hard to top WWII as the engine that made smoking pervasive. Soldiers’ rations included a pack of cigarettes. By the end of the war, nearly every soldier and sailor smoked, and when he came home he got his future wife to smoke too. My tin soldier is reaching for a smoke.
He is sitting on the stand of our computer’s speakers, ignoring me as I type. He was created by a company long gone several decades ago. Someone came up with the idea, someone else created the mold. A boy received it as a present probably in a set with other soldiers. No doubt pissed that this guy was just sitting around, not shooting or doing anything else cool, the kid kept the sitting soldier at the bottom of the box and never played with him (I assume so, as the details painted on him are still intact after many decades.) Somehow he got mixed in with the set I bought to sell. The small toy soldier is not shooting nor marching, just relaxing with legs crossed, reaching not for glory but for a smoke.
He reminds me of something one of my favorite writers said when I heard him speak over a dozen years ago. Kurt Vonnegut created the eyes, the humor, and world view of many people of my vintage and before, acting as the priest of the bemused alienation of the young. Vonnegut was a veteran of World War II, his experiences in the war inspiring much of his novel Slaughterhouse Five. When I saw him in a university auditorium, the young students were curious about him, no doubt, but were not waiting on his every word with the expectation and worship of those in their 30s, 40s and 50s who read all his books when young. He has since published much of what he said in that and probably many lectures in his last book, A Man Without a Country. He told a tale of some tasks he did on a daily basis, going to the store to get an envelope and some paper, going to the post office to mail a letter. From the rambling story, which, coming from him, glorified the mundane and made it funny and epic, he concluded that we’re basically here to fart around. Not exactly soaring graduation speech rhetoric. The tin soldier would make Vonnegut proud. So, to commemorate the writer’s ethos and memory, my tin soldier, quietly avoiding the complications and worry of war, is now named Kurt.
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