The first Stahlhelm I ever held.
Story time.
As a little kid, one of the favorite pastimes of our neighborhood cohort was "playing army". We’d dress up in our father’s fatigues and webgear and grab our plastic rifles and machine guns, divide into teams, and run around the fields and woods playing war. Movies like Kelly’s Heroes, the Guns of Navarone, The Great Escape, etc. fueled our imaginations.
Well, one of the kids lived with his grandparents in our neighborhood and the grandfather was a WWII ETO veteran. One day he shows up with a "German helmet" that his grandfather brought back. We oooh’d and aaah’d over it and then decided the "enemy" team had to make one of their members wear it. Only later in life would I know how to correctly describe it. It’s a no-decal M40 reissue with a 1944 dated liner band and thick dark gray reissue paint. It’s stamped ET64 and the lot number is lost under the thick reissue paint. The liner was already long gone and the kid who got stuck wearing it had to wear a knit cap underneath to avoid a headache. That wasn’t a problem as "playing army" was more often a winter distraction for us while on hiatus from sports.
We wore this thing for a couple years through many a battle with no thought that it could be valuable. Heck, the kid said he’d found it in the attic above his grandfather’s garage. But this helmet opened my eyes to the concept of G.I. bring backs. It really sparked in my young mind the idea that this stuff was out there and later I resolved to collect some of it. It’s not too much of an overstatement to say this helmet is at least partly responsible for me becoming a collector.
Well, after grade school we stopped "playing army" and around early high school time the kid with the helmet and I went our separate ways in life. That was a nice way of putting it. Later I heard he’d died of a drug overdose as a young man.
Fast forward to years later. I’m already a collector and I’ve bought some helmets among many other items, but I still vividly remember this helmet that I’d played with as a kid. I’m home from college for Christmas break and I decide to make a run down to a coin shop in town because I knew they did militaria on the side. I walk in there and I see this helmet, the helmet from my childhood war games, sitting on the shelf along with a few others. I recognized it even up on the shelf. It was like a small electric current went through my body. Trying to really play it cool, I ask to see a couple items out of a display case first before casually asking them to pull the helmet down from the shelf. I turned it over in my hands…. this is it… this is the one! I knew 100% from the dents that as kids we imagined were WWII battle scars, but more likely some family member or even the grandfather himself had taken it out to the family farm and tried their .22 rifle out on it. Still playing it cool I reveal no prior connection to the helmet and negotiate the best price I can. In fact I bought a 1916 WWI trench helmet along with the M40 to disguise my particular interest and get a discount for buying both! This helmet had vanished from my life once, I wasn’t going to let it get away again. I was quite the happy camper to bring it home that day.
It’s not a very valuable piece as far as TR combat helmets go, but it means something to me. 
