From hagerty.com:
"I've always been a collector, going back to childhood. As a kid, I collected coins, stamps, and baseball cards. As a teen, it was Lionel trains. But in 1961, when I was 10 years old, my parents gave me my first Aurora HO scale slot car set, and that changed the course of my life.
The year before, the Aurora Plastics Corporation of West Hempstead, NY, introduced HO scale slot cars to the US market. The company thought the slot cars would complement its HO trains, but boys like me had other ideas. The cars sold by the millions, and American kids, it seemed, wanted to race them, not drive them through a model train layout. As a result, slot car tracks, where anyone (mostly boys and men) could race cars from HO 1/87 scale to 1/24 scale, began opening up all over the country.
Such was their popularity that Aurora and the Ford Motor Company teamed up in 1962 to kick off the Ford/Aurora Grand National contest. Local hobby shops hosted the weekly races and crowned a store winner. That winner went on to race other store winners to become state champion, and regional champions raced on national television for a large trophy and the keys to a 1962 Ford Thunderbird. It was a huge success, with promotions across the US in hobby stores and Ford dealerships. The finals took place on The Today Show on NBC in fall 1962."
Read the rest of the story HERE.
