Frank Thompson learned to drive on a Pontiac, so when he bought his first new car in 1969, just five months after he married his wife, Noreen, he bought a Pontiac GTO.
“I wasn’t in awe so much of GTOs so much as Pontiacs,” says Thompson, 68, of Baldwin.
Pontiac manufactured its GTOs between 1964 and 1974, starting the high-performance “muscle car” trend, and again from 2004 to 2006.
Thompson drag-raced his GTO at local race tracks. But after his wife had their first child, “the car went because of the cost. Drag racing gets expensive. And we needed a family car,” he says.
Still, the fond memories of the original GTO and Thompson’s drag-racing days remained. So, with their daughters grown, he and Noreen began going to car cruises in 1998. After sharing memories of the GTO with his three daughters, the middle daughter, Bonnie Klingensmith, now 36, bought her father a small scale model of a GTO. Not to be outdone by her younger sister, Renee Thompson, now 39, bought her father a green 1969 GTO Judge model because she knew her father’s first GTO was green. The couple also has a third daughter, Abby Weiland, 30, who has bought her father GTO gifts.
In the past 11 years, Thompson bought not only a full-sized GTO but accumulated some 1,200 scale-model GTOs. A sign in his basement room devoted to the GTO bears a clear warning: “GTO parking only; all others will be towed and crushed.”
“1,200 models is far from average regardless of the scope of a collection,” says Jay Olins of Los Angeles, a member of the Diecast Car Collectors Club, which numbers about 2,500 members around the world.
“He doesn’t only get a certain year, if it comes out in three or four colors, he has to get one of each,” says John Cherevka of Brentwood, who like Thompson is a member of the Greater Pittsburgh GTO Club. Cherevka also collects GTO models, but only replicas of the 1964 model, to match his own 1964 GTO of which he is an original owner.
Thompson keeps many of his diecast GTOs in plastic, mirror-backed display cases designed to fit one car in each compartment. He has hung the cases neatly on the walls of the GTO room, which has a black-and-white tile floor to mimic the checkerboard racing flag. The result is a small jewel box of automotive memorabilia.
Thompson’s wife, Noreen, doesn’t mind that her husband’s collection occupies an entire basement room, which she rarely visits. “I’m glad that he has something to do,” she says of her husband, a NexTech retiree.
| 
| 