I'm reasonably certain that the first castings I ever valued were my Matchbox cars and trucks. Most of them were not too fancy, just lots of passenger cars and trucks, and some racecars, shared by my brothers and me (though, I recall we had the James Bond car and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang). They were real to us, thanks to their extraordinary detail and our own imaginations. And they were virtually indestructable. I'm sure some of them are still in the toy boxes down in my parents' basement.

This all came back to me when I read the obituary for Jack Odell, the original designer and founder of the Matchbox empire.

It's a surprisingly familiar story, though I'd never heard it before. In the early 1950s Odell's daughter asked him for a toy she could carry to school for show-and-tell, the restriction being that her item had to fit inside a matchbox. He put some native skill to work, and one thing led to another, so that by 1962 his company was producing more Rolls-Royces in a day than Rolls had produced in its history.

In the years since I began covering the metalcasting world I've learned one thing very well: people who working in metalcasting love metalcasting, and that seems to have been true of Jack Odell, too. But, he also managed to find a way to make millions of others love those castings, as well, and for that we all should be grateful.