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There really is no end. It just becomes
a matter how much time you have to
devote and how much money you can
afford to spend to make your collection
continue to expand.
Is that all there is to it? Well, not
exactly. Once you have amassed your
collection, your next hurdle is the
question of whether to store it or dis-
play it. Warehousing it doesn’t really
do it justice. At this point you’re just a
hoarder with everything in boxes, hid-
den away in closets, basements or at-
tics. I’ve even seen spare rooms with
boxes stacked to the ceiling. The more
you have, the more difficult it is to dis-
play everything. I’ve seen some pretty
creative methods, but most of the
larger collections have, at some point,
outpaced their owners’ ability to dis-
play them. That doesn’t seem to stop
anyone, however, so strong is that col-
lector’s gene.
John Atzbach is off any scale any-
one can come up with. He grew up in
a small town in Montana and as far
back as he can remember had an in-
terest in collecting things.While main-
taining a paper route, he became
friendly with one of his customers, an
older lady with a large collection of art
objects and trinkets which proved to
be both rare and valuable. He found
them interesting, the way a nine year-
old would, She had a small library of
books about them which he borrowed,
one book at a time, and learned the
history and intricacies of the things
she had collected. Much of it had been
created in Czarist Russia, prior to the
1917 Revolution.
Eager to leave the small town
Montana life, after high school he held
a yard sale, selling almost everything
he owned and set out for Seattle where
his brother lived. He was hired at a
bank as a teller, and progressed
steadily for ten years to become a spe-
cialist in currency trading. He worked
forty to fifty hours a week at the bank
and, after hours, put in another forty
to fifty hours running a small business
of his own, buying and selling antiques
and collectibles. He was running
around in a twenty year-old white ‘66
Mustang with a 6-cylinder and a
three-speed that a previous owner had
painted blue LeMans stripes on. Being
The SHELBY AMERICAN
Winter 2016 61
There are probably more Hertz collectibles than you can imagine. Once you run out of
gathering Shelby Hertz items from the 1960s and don’t want to stop (or can’t stop) there
are an almost unlimited number of things from Hertz. Your collecting can continue at
almost any airport.
Another popular peripheral area of Shelby collectibles are Gulf items. This comes from
the connection with the Gulf GT40s that raced in 1968-1969, winning the 24 Hours of
LeMans. Gulf also used images of the GT40 in several advertisements and marketing
campaigns, which further cemented the relationship. It continues today, with the 2006
Gulf Heritage Ford GTs.