
The Man Who Loved Tanks - peter123
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/13/BAHA157UND.DTL
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russell
I was at his place for a fund raiser a while back. It is a truly awesome
place, hundreds of tanks in huge metal buildings around a courtyard. My
favorite was a scud missile launcher complete with scud from Yugoslavia (not
Iraq). You would expect that a missile would be bright and shiny, like a new
car, but no, this thing looked it had been beaten with sledge hammers. I am
not sure whether it was the assembly process or whether it had just had a hard
life.

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tlb
It was an amazing collection, and he had a team of people who really
understood those machines. My favorite was a Russian radar system with giant
water-cooled vacuum tubes that emitted radar pulses at some absurdly high
power. That or the mobile bridge.

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andreyf
I'm always amazed by people who can go to school for ~16 years, work for five
years, and then spend the rest of their lives to "managing investments",
sitting on various boards, and collecting tanks.

 _sigh_ wish I could do that...

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dpifke
I've seen his collection on TV a few times. They used two of his tanks in an
episode of Mythbusters, and the restoration of the Panzer tank mentioned in
the above article was chronicled on a program called "Tank Overhaul":

[http://military.discovery.com/convergence/tank-
overhaul/epis...](http://military.discovery.com/convergence/tank-
overhaul/episode/episode.html)

His family has my condolences. Hopefully they'll now find a way to open his
collection to the public.

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vaksel
that sucks, I saw a special about him on CNBC and he seemed like a nice guy.

\+ he was an actual gear head and knew how to work on his stuff + drove
it...instead of being one of those collectors who goes to an auction and buys
a completed project that someone else poured thousands of hours into

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ctingom
Ok, now that's what you call a hobby!

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mynameishere
Never got the chance to die in one.

You better believe that's what he was thinking about the whole time. Who
wouldn't?

~~~
eru
Why should he want to die in a tank?

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mynameishere
It's better than cancer. Lots of people through history have wanted to die in
battle.

~~~
eru
Perhaps. Though the article states that he was not a fan of war.

