Lego collector hopes to start museum

Michael Todd clearly remembers getting his first Lego bricks as a young boy. He had sent in a coupon cut off the side of a Velveeta cheese package, and a few weeks later, a small, unmarked cardboard box arrived in the mail. His father opened the box, and a handful of plastic bricks fell into his lap.

His father didn’t know what to make of the package’s contents, but Todd scooped up the bricks and ran out of the room.

“I was hooked. It kept me involved for hours,” said Todd, 47, who now lives in Pauma Valley with his wife, Beth, the couple’s 5-year-old daughter, Michelle, and “30ish” indoor and outdoor cats.

That early introduction to the world of interlocking plastic bricks became a lifelongpassion.

Today, Todd’s house is a veritable Lego museum, with plastic bins and shelves full of Lego toys lining the walls, and glass-fronted display cases holding antique wooden toys made by the Danish company in the 1930s and ’40s, before it began turning out its signature plastic bricks. (The name Lego is an abbreviation of two Danish words, leg godt, which means, “play well.”)

The company now markets its products worldwide, and has Lego-themed amusement parks in several countries, including Legoland in Carlsbad.

“I live, eat and breathe Lego,” said Todd, who often finds the odd Lego piece in his pants pocket or scattered in his car. He estimated his collection — which spills into bins covered by plastic tarps in his front yard — at millions of pieces, along with