Pistons & Brunch - Show & Toy Drive

About this event

Most car-and-bike shows in Southern California put you in a car park and leave you there. This one is indoors and climate-controlled, which in Anaheim is less of a luxury than it sounds. The Highway 39 Event Center runs the show itself rather than renting the room out to a promoter, and it publishes no founder and no founding year — only that the place began as a private passion project to preserve mid-century American cars and grew into one of the largest private collections in Orange County. Bikes are a named class in the show's own title rather than something merely tolerated. Entry is free, nothing needs booking, and a new unwrapped toy gets you a burger and fries, which is the whole of the fundraising mechanism. Anaheim Fire & Rescue takes the toys, and what follows is a firefighters' operation on a scale the morning does not suggest: buses filled at the Honda Center, a warehouse to sort them, and dozens of county charities drawing from it. What you will remember, though, is the room — forty-odd restored cars parked under one of the county's biggest collections of old neon.