The baseball star has been collecting cars since he was a teenager.
Reggie Jackson most likely has around 100 cars. In 1988, he had 97 vehicles, but 35 were destroyed in a fire. Jackson is fairly private about the extent of his luxury car collection, but one can imagine that over the decades he has worked to replace the cars that perished in the fire. In 2018, he put 19 cars up for auction, indicating that he had a significant amount of cars before the sale, in order to sell so many at one event.
Stick around to learn more about Reggie Jackson’s love for collecting cars.
How did he get interested in cars?
“I had the love of cars from childhood,” Reggie revealed to USA Today while sitting in his extensive garage chock-full of luxury vehicles.
He continued, “I think it just has to do with cars being the American way of showing our success.”
Reggie recalled a game he and his friends would play when he was a child. “We sat on the front porch in the summer. And six to eight kids…we would name the car. Say a Bel Air…or an Impala,” Reggie explained.
He continued, “And then, if you could catch an insignia on the side of a ’62 and see if it was a 327 [cubic-inch engine] or if it was a 409, you got points for that, too.”
“You got points, and you won a glass of Kool-Aid. That’s how I started out,” he concluded.
The young Reggie’s father also instilled knowledge of cars in his son early on. Reggie would help his father with his dry-cleaning route. The two would drive around collecting the laundry and sometimes the vehicle would run into trouble.
“In the ’60s [my father] had a route, as I had a paper route, of about 70 or 80 people…so we ran around and picked up their clothes and dry cleaning and brought them back to them a couple days later,” Reggie recalled.
He went on, “Sometimes you had to fix the truck or change the carburetor or a fan belt or something like that to keep them running. So we’d be out there busting our knuckles and scratching up our hands getting them running, so you just kind of got into the understanding of how the mechanics worked on a car.”
“And that’s kind of how I got into cars,” he concludes.
Reggie revealed that his first ever car was a ‘51 Chevrolet, bought from his brother for $5. Then, he started saving money from his paper route to buy a ‘51 Ford and got one when he was 15.
“When I was 16, I bought my dream car, which was a ‘55 Chevy,” Reggie recalled. Since he was a teenager, his love for collecting (and the size of his garage) has only grown.
Which cars are in his collection?
Reggie doesn’t discriminate in terms of period when he’s in the market for a new vehicle, since his car collection ranges from near-century-old 1930 vehicles up until ‘80s classics.
Talking about the auction in 2018 where he sold 19 of his treasured vehicles, which was upcoming at the time of the interview, he said, “I probably have a good half dozen I wouldn’t part ways with. I have a Ferrari that’s worth probably $15 million, and I’m going to sell that in a couple years.”
He continued, “I’ve got some cars I love and like having around, but you know, they all come to a point where it’s time to let them go, and I think it’s time for me to pare my collection down.”
The Tragic Blaze
In 1988, Reggie lost 35 vehicles in a fire at his warehouse. The fire was reported to start next door, in a furniture store but spread to the baseballers property.
Fire Lt. David Allen, revealed, “Everything that was in there was gone.”
Reggie visited the warehouse after the blaze and was seen to be visibly upset. Hopefully, now enough time has passed and the baseball star has been able to move on from his loss, perhaps by purchasing even more cars.