The story of an unlikely discovery

Dated: January 10, 1999.

Around 1970 I got hooked on Airfix Figures, a box of Romans being the start of it all. In those days the boxes hung from racks on the wall, thus being without the piece of card covering the punchholes (collector's horror!). Somewhere along the line Airfix must have rethought their marketing-strategy, and they came up with a marvelous rotating stand, carrying the new round AIRFIX-logo on top. This puts the introduction at around 1972-3. The hours I spent in our local toyshop browsing through the boxes in that stand are countless, and my mother's frustration with the time it took to pick just one box is immeasurable. Then in 1975 the 'blue boxes' started to be replaced by the 'white boxes', and the stands dissapeared one by one as well. The introduction of the larger 'long box' heralded the end of the last remaining ones. I myself hadn't seen any since 1980. The only picture I had of it came from an advertisement in the January 1975 Airfix Magazine, where it can be seen in the lower left corner. It was, however, much lower than I remembered.



When I started to realise that the Airfix Boxes from my childhood were disappearing, the stands had already gone. I began collecting 'blue boxes' in the early eighties, when a box of Wagon Train or High Chapparal could still be found in back-alley shops for as little as $2.00. I'm glad I did, since prices have moved upward somewhat since then... All these years I dreamed of finding such a stand to put my collection in, not believing for a minute that this would ever happen. How wrong can you be.

The Internet, in combination with a well-paying IT-job, has done much to rekindle my old hobby. The HäT-website has been a great help and stimulus in this process. One of the pleasing contacts I made as a result of earlier articles was with Ricardo Haddad of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who shares my passion for the old Airfix sets. Last december we exchanged some e-mails about old dreams that would probably never come true (walking into a shop still full of 'blue boxes', finding an AFFORDABLE Atlantic Colosseum, etc.). I sent him a scan of the stand from the Bowler advertisement, adding the words 'the chance of finding one is small though'. Within a week I could e-mail Ricardo that I had found my stand!

The story is rather unlikely. When I joined the AFV-modelling Club Dutch Armour Association in 1983, they met in the attic of a small timberworkshop in Veenendaal, in the center of the Netherlands. In the late sixties the owner had added some balsawood aeroplanes to his stock, to sell in the small hobbyshop in front of his workshop. A few customers asked for plastic models, and after a few years he had a stock of 1500 different models. Not bad for those days. The club met in the attic, but when it grew bigger another location had to be found. We left Veenendaal, but I did return to the shop every now and again. Last year I was posted to a customer in Utrecht, which means I pass Veenendaal on the A12 highway each day. I started to visit the shop more regularly.
Last december I went there because I was looking for old Dutch language Airfix catalogues for a collector in England. The shopkeeper couldn't find them, but said that they must be somewhere, 'since I never throw anything away'. I told him that more people should have acted that way. 'Just the other day I e-mailed my friend Ricardo in Brazil about those stands Airfix used to sell their figures in. Everybody threw them away when they got bigger boxes'. He looked at me and smiled. ' But I didn't, it's in the back of the workshop' he just said.

When I recovered from the shock and the message sank in, I asked if I could see it. We left the shop, crossed the snow-covered yard into the now defunct workshop, looked for the lights, and passed the ladder we used to climb when the club still met there. Finally, around a corner, in the back, covered with at least fifteen years of dust, was an empty but complete Airfix stand. It had been there all those years but I had never been in this corner of the workshop, nor had I ever asked about the stand. You see, it does pay off to simply ASK sometimes...

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