Dean Milano is getting married. With the big 5-0 breathing down his neck, the guy who collects everything is finally collecting a bride. They’ll celebrate with a bash at Brookfield Zoo, where musicians who’ve played with him in more bands than anyone can remember will get the place jumping and every table will sport its own miniature Buick or Corvair or you-name-it from his model-car collection. When it’s all over he’ll move into his bride’s pretty Cape Cod in Elmhurst and live happily ever after. There’s just one small matter he has to take care of first: the 4,000 vintage model-car kits and 400 model cars plus dozens of old store displays, dioramas, Marx playsets, maps, clocks, radios, beer ads, and automobile-related toys and games that are piled up to the ceilings and bursting out of the closets in his own house in Addison, where he’s lived for the last five years. These things, the fruit of a lifetime of joyous acquisition, cannot move with him to the bride’s digs. The wedding gift Milano needs most is a nice little storefront museum.
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The art on kit boxes and store displays from the 1930s to the ’60s makes them more valuable in some cases than the model cars themselves. Advertising art was inventive and idealistic then, Milano says–before a campaign for truth in advertising in the mid-60s turned packaging realistic. After that, “manufacturers had to show a stark photo of the toy, and all the art that had fired the kids’ imaginations was gone.” He’s scouting for a museum location in the Elmhurst-Addison-Villa Park area, but meanwhile some of the pieces from his collection (including vintage store displays and dioramas) can be seen in “Cruisin’ Cars: the Dean Milano Collection of Model Cars,” opening July 8 and running through July 30 at the Elmhurst Art Museum, 150 Cottage Hill Avenue, Elmhurst. Museum hours are 10 to 4 Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday; 1 to 4 Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. Admission is $3 for adults, $2 for children over 12; it’s free on Tuesdays. Milano will be at the museum to lecture about his collection July 15 at 2 PM. Call 630-834-0202 for more information. –Deanna Isaacs
