“We always talked to Elmer and Bernadette, and I never knew that they had this (toy). All these years, and here it is up at his museum, which we were always going to take a drive over and see the museum, and we never got there.” Elmer passed in 2019, and while his family spent the next several years running the museum without him, the time eventually came to sell the collection. With thousands of toys, pedal cars and full-sized classic and collector cars comprising Elmer’s collection, the family chose Mecum Auctions to take on the challenge of offering a large portion of the items at auction. Schramm, an avid follower and fan of the Mecum brand, received an email promoting the event, and she said she was stunned. “I thought, oh my god, we never went there. So, when my husband came home, I said, hey! We’ve got to go over there. They’re going to have an auction.” As their plans to attend the auction got underway, Schramm hopped online to browse through some of the listings. “I was sitting here, and all of the sudden, I came upon my little toy, and I just sat here in awe. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was in shock, like, that’s my toy! There were several pictures on there, and I went through every one I don’t know how many times. And I was like, my god, that is mine.” Schramm said she recognized the toy as her own due to a very specific repair she remembered her dad performing on the horse after a particularly rough fall, one that sent both her and the horse rolling head over heels after the front wheel became lodged in a crack in the sidewalk. Before long, she and her husband were on their way to the museum in advance of the auction to see the toy in person. Schramm said that she, her husband and members of the Duellman family all spent hours looking through the buildings trying to find Little Blackie with no luck, until finally, she spotted it on her third lap around the last building on the Duellman property. “I screamed out, I found it! And everybody came running. I said there it is, that’s it.” Soon, auction week arrived, and Schramm and her husband were ready with a weeklong reservation at a nearby hotel. They spent every day browsing the countless items available for bids and socializing with staff and other customers. Schramm said it seemed as if everybody had heard bits of their serendipitous story and that all of them were hungry for more. “They really seemed to roll out the red carpet for me,” she said, noting that both Dana and Frank Mecum stopped by to talk 122 // MECUM.COM 122 // MECUM.COM
