You want a car from Jim Krom’s garage, take it. You want to leave one, that’s great — but the truth is, he’ll look the other way if you don’t.
“It’s the parents,” Krom said, who’ve been enforcing the trade-offs. Leave a car, take a car, and then skip on home and play with a car.
As for Krom, 54, there’s enough little kid and enough car guy in him that he understands the impulse. A pastel yellow Hot Wheels Thunderbird convertible? Grab it!
Jim’s Garage opened on New Year’s Day, bolted atop a post in Krom’s Huntington Woods front yard. It’s the same concept as those Little Free Library boxes on lawns or at parks or maybe in front of the big free library in your city, but with toy cars — and it’s off to a roaring start.
On Tuesday, Jan. 7, less than a week since he announced the debut on a neighborhood Facebook page, Krom peeked inside and said, “Most of these are not the ones I stocked it with.”
Out of 70 original Hot Wheels vehicles, in other words, more than 50% had found new homes, with many of those replaced by something else.
Some swaps are Hot-Wheels-for-Hot-Wheels. Some include other brands, and if you’ve been searching for a tiny white sedan with Chewbacca at the wheel, hurry on over. What’s important is that kids are leaving happy.
Slyly and subtly, Krom is indoctrinating the youths of Hart Avenue and nearby streets with a philosophy he has lived by for as long as he can remember:
“Cars are cool.”
Cheap transportation to the past
If you’re old enough, the Jim’s Garage color scheme will remind you of a Gulf gas station, with the name in dark lettters on each side inside an orange circle against a powder blue background.
Inspired by a few similar projects he saw online, but unimpressed with their limited capacity, Krom built his version out of spare pinewood, about 18-inches-by-18-inches and 12 inches deep.
Its three shelves are painted like yellow-striped parking lots. The garage door opens from the bottom, has clear plexiglas panels to show off the vehicles, and latches with magnets to keep from shutting on small hands.
A car club buddy — shout-out to Patrick Grogan, of Royal Oak, who drives a keen ’64 Oldsmobile — did the pinstriping and lettering, including the instruction in front to “Take A Car Leave A Car.”
As for the Hot Wheels, they come from most anyplace with a toy department.
Krom’s parents raced at Waterford Hills when he was a kid, and he and the other competitors’ children would while away their time rolling die-cast cars down orange plastic rails.
Today, “I always go to the Hot Wheels aisle,” he said, with aisle F-3 at the Meijer store on Eight Mile in Detroit a favorite.
Cars there cost $1.29, or $6.99 for a five-pack (and no, that math does not track: five individual models would total only $6.45).
Krom’s favorites tend to be “actual cars,” as he puts it, rather than fanciful interpretations, “and I’m not a guy who keeps them in the blister packs.”
Some people treat them like investments, untouched and probably unseen, but where’s the fun in that?
Fueling the future
Krom works in the auto industry, naturally, though unlike most of his colleagues, he had to leave a job at a pizza joint and take a pay cut to get started.
He hadn’t gone to college, but he had drive and talent, and 35 years later he’s a manufacturing engineer with an Auburn Hills-based supplier called Voltava.
In his spare time, after working with cars all week, he works on cars. He also has other interests, including rockabilly music, his wife, and their two kids and three cats, but cars do tend to be a recurring theme.
The 1949 Cadillac beneath a canvas cover on his specially expanded driveway is a showpiece. A 1964 Corvette, also beneath a cover, is a long-term project. There’s a 1985 Chevrolet C-10 pickup, plus assorted family cars, plus a 1955 Chevy Bel Air parked diagonally in the cluttered garage that’s on the verge of nearly being ready to run.
The Bel Air is red and white, as is his long beard, as are two VW Beetles in Jim’s Garage. A few steps away from Jim’s is Ms. Joyce’s Library, an actual Little Free Library.
It’s curated by Joyce Krom, a manager in the Detroit Public Library system, who has discovered across 27 years of marriage that she likes cars, too.
The Little Free Library organization began with a single box in 2009 and now has more than 200,000 others registered across the planet.
Krom said he’s considering building another garage and giving it away, and he’d like to see car libraries catch on, if perhaps with more modest expectations.
“The baby boomers are aging out of car culture,” he noted, and even their kids are on the wrong side of the growth curve.
The true future is still using training wheels, and needs to stand on tiptoe to see the upper shelf of Jim’s Garage.
“There’s a meme that goes, ‘The world’s most expensive hobby starts at 99 cents,’ ” Krom said.
Or, in Huntington Woods, it’s free.
Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: At this home, it’s take-a-car, leave-a-car, to keep car culture alive
Reporting by Neal Rubin, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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