Hello, my name is Tracy Byrd. I started to collect Hurst/Olds items when I was around 14 years old. My father was into muscle cars, which is where I got it from. I would save my money from doing odd jobs around our house and area then anxiously go to our local swap meet which was held once a year. I would take all my money, go there and buy what ever I could find regarding the Hurst/Olds cars. It had to be mint otherwise I would not buy it and hopefully I would find another down the road. I wish I would of bought it all now!!Aft er a few years I thought I had all the literature that was made regarding these Hurst/Olds cars. Well what would I start to collect now?

I went with vintage Hurst performance items, these were a little easier to find and there were more and different items to acquire but I had to stay within my budget of course. When I thought I had all of that, I went with Linda Vaughn items. I remember I could buy the full size cardboard Linda Vaughn standup in the box for $50.00 all day long nobody really wanted items like this back then after I thought I had all of that, I went with the Hurst wheels items. Well I'm still collecting at 41 years old and I now know there is no end to it!! Even if you have a bottomless pocketbook they made so much different stuff it would blow your mind. I have over 1,800 items in my collection and I always seem to find something new regarding Hurst.

It's fun for me to locate new items for the collection which I will pass down to my son, hopefully he will keep it going after I'm gone. My favorite Hurst cars would be the 72 Hurst/Olds convertible, 69 Hurst/Olds, 69 HURST SC/Rambler, 71/72 Hurst SSJ Grand Prix. I never had to travel to far to locate Hurst items, I made a lot of contacts from Hemming's Motor News so once a month I would call people and ask them if they had anything new, got to be kind of expensive on the long distance phone calls but worth it!! Well thank god for computers that made it a lot easier and of course so did eBay.

Remember when Mr. Gasket bought Hurst, well they wanted to do a short movie of some sort but did not have any info regarding Hurst from the early years. Well they some how learned of my collection and wanted to talk to me, which they finally did by phone shortly after, only problem was they wanted me to send my entire collection to them to use, well after about 1 maybe 2 seconds of thought, I didn't think that would be a good idea and I told them they could come here and photograph it or what ever they had to do. I guess that wasn't what they wanted so they scraped the idea, to bad would of liked to seen what they came up with. Anyway's this is how I started in this never ending collection of Hurst items.
I have also been collecting other original dealer items from various other auto makers and even Yenko, Motion, Mickey, Dodge scat pack items and even Dodge and Plymouth promos which is really expensive and I can't always seem to find Hurst items, so now I will have to find other items to collect ...
      Even to this day, it never ceases to amaze me how much stuff there is out there to be found and it always surprises me when I find something I have never seen before.

Tracy Byrd
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