RIP Continental Hobby Center

This makes me so sick. (There's a rant coming on here)
We had a hobby store back when I was a kid called Continental Hobby Center or as everyone called it "Continentals".  It was a small private owned mom n pop Hobby shop.  They carried minatures, doll house supplies, model train accessories, they held RC car racing in the upstairs area, they carried model car kits and anything and everything craft. From expensive to the cheapest.  Little flocked teddy bears for .25 and little plastic soda cans for .10 each. lol  I still have a bunch of those little flocked sitting teddy bears. They also carried Breyers.  They had a huge display case in the front of the store where one of every Breyer they had graced the shelf.  I was horse crazy ever since I was four.  It was a treat to go there and I'd just gaze up at the horses and drool forever. We didn't have a lot of money then and $30+ for a plastic horse model was unheard of for my family. (Stay at home mom-three kids-dad worked full time at Kmart as a maintenance man)  We were lucky we had heat in the winter. So even after I had my own money I had just never bought a Breyer. I think I literally forgot I could. So in 1998 I went to Continentals and discovered Stablemates. I was in love.  Tiny Breyer's...... all the detail of the big ones........$3.00 each!  I bought one of every one they had. I still have those today. I'll have to take a picture of my stablemate collection. The only mold I conga (or attempt to) is the sm ASB. Anyway, the first time I bought a traditional Breyer was in the year 2000 I think and the horse I bought was Carpe Diem. I was there with my mom. Just a few years before she died, and I saw that horse and thought it was so pretty.  I'll never forget my mom saying to me,  "Why don't you get it?'  Then she offered to get it for me and I said No, I'm going to get it.  I don't know why I never bought a Breyer before then. I've worshipped these horse statues all my life.  Carpe Diem was followed by Stardust the Unicorn.  It's funny now that I think about it, because I hack these things apart every day.  I literally take dremmels and butane torches and melt them down and cut them apart.  It's nothing for me to get a Breyer body anywhere. And when I was a kid, obtaining or even touching one of these horses was like getting your hands on a moon rock.

Well, years ago the Continental Hobby Center closed up.  The building was sold to a man that had a vintage toy shop.  Basically it's a toy and comic pawn shop is what it is. Let's be real here.  It's a nasty dirty pawn shop. It was called The Collector's Lair, or The Vault. He had a shop across town also but when he bought this store, he got rid of that one.  Anyway, they had every vintage (well 70's and 80's) toy you could think of.  But the problem was this store went through a transformation that you wouldn't believe.  The Continental Hobby Center was a tile floor, CLEAN, establisment. The aisles were neat and everything was pristine. Glass display cases and white shelves. In a couple of months after the Vault moved in, this place looked like a DUMP. They added ratty carpet to parts of the store that I'm sure there weren't before.  The shelves were overloaded with boxes and books and figures.  They had aisles blocked with toys and chests and tubs of loose action figures everywhere. They had boxes stacked up on top of each other in the middle of the aisles.  There were even big spills of paint in the aisles left there on the carpet to dry and harden to an unremovable stained mess. The place looked like a teenage boys bedroom.  An extremely MESSY teenage boys bedroom. You couldn't turn around in there. I'm serious. You could not turn around. It was a death trap in that building. Things piled up from floor to ceiling as far as the eye could see.  Everytime we went in there we were so disgusted we wanted to call and report them to the fire marshall but we remembered all the hard to find toys and action figures and things we could get there we could never find anywhere else.  (Luvjeordie=Avid toy collector)  So we never called thinking someone must have already done it.  Year after year the same mess.  The place was almost laughable it was so messy. It was a falling hazard, a tripping hazard, a fire hazard, We always said if that place ever caught on fire, they'd never get it out. People would never be able to get out.  Doors were blocked with junk and toys.  Even the mess flooded outside where they stacked up old broken shelves and other various garbage and junk in front of the store on the sidewalk.  Hoarders.  That's exactly what it looked like.  It looked like an espisode of one of those hoarding shows. Junk and just ...STUFF everywhere. You had to crawl and wade through the mess physically. And this was a business and it stayed like that for years!  Until last Saturday morning at 4:00 am. 

http://www.wset.com/story/20712724/crews-to-demolish-building-firefighters-still-on-scene-of-hobby-store-fire-in-lynchburg

Nobody is buying the owners story.  He was on the news last night standing there shifting his weight back n forth looking at the ground and not the interview's eyes or the cameras, while smiling and talking in the most unremorseful attitude you've ever heard come from a man who's just lost his entire livelyhood.  There's talk all over the city about the owner having set the store on fire himself to get the insurence money out of it.  Talk that the Fire Marshalls were after him, and that they were the reason behind his having to clean up the store a lot several months ago.  The last time we were in there was right before Xmas and even though it was still filled with junk everywhere, you could see someone must have made them put a dent in it, because the loose figures were put up in crates and not strone everywhere. The aisles were somewhat passable.  It was a tiny bandaid but a bandaid nonetheless.  Anyway, there's a lot of talk.  I don't know what insurence company gave this moron a policy to insure his business but there's no way in hell I'd give him a nickel on it to replace a single baseball card the way he was just ASKING for that fire.  You don't keep a store looking like that and cash in on a policy after it catches fire.  To see that man talk about the store and then stand there and SMILE and crack jokes about not having anything to do the next day.  Makes my skin crawl.  Insurence investigators and the Fire Marshalls are investigating heavily.  They can't get down in the basement yet to determine cause.  This building looked fairly small, but it was two stories down in the basement.  It had a fallout shelter in the bottom of it.  Few people knew that. So when the fire broke out , it came from the basement....fire fighters weren't allowed IN the building to put it out.  Because the floors weren't stable to stand on. They literally had to stay out the window and hose in from ladder trucks. The fire was last Saturday, and it's still burning today down below. This is all that's left of the Continental Hobby Center.

http://www.wset.com/story/20754509/hobby-store-still-smoldering-after-saturdays-fire