When Dale Cripps was a kid, his parents couldn’t afford many of the battery-operated toys he wanted to play with. So in his grown-up years, he became a passionate collector of the very toys he never had.

Cripps, 62, is a Honolulu gemologist and jeweler by trade who started collecting 1950s vintage toys about 25 years ago. Like many, he was drawn by nostalgia to collect the toys of his youth.

"Someone who’s 40-plus years old looks at it and says, ‘I remember that,’ and they’ll have a story that goes with it. That’s such a big part of collecting these battery-operated toys," Cripps said.

His collection is expansive, including several categories of vintage toys. It includes a 200-piece set of antique, wooden Schoenhut Humpty Dumpty Circus toys, which he amassed over 12 years. The collection will be displayed at the Coney Island Museum in New York starting Sept. 10 until the end of the month and will then go up for auction.

Cripps focuses mostly on a mix of tin wind-up and battery-operated toys made between the 1950s and 1970s that range in value from about $175 to $750 apiece. He has about 50 pieces in all.

The simplest is a tin wind-up bird made in Germany. It is colorfully painted and moves its head and wings while warbling a song. He says the bird "epitomizes the very best of tin lithography."

Then there’s the Roaring Gorilla, made by a Japanese toy manufacturer.

The battery-operated gorilla walks and roars and its eyes light up, but what makes it unique is that beneath its fur, there’s a tin blue-and-white police car. Cripps explained that the manufacturer would often redesign toys if they weren’t selling, and this apparently unpopular police car became a gorilla.

Cripps’ most recent acquisition is a 1970s battery-operated Mickey Mouse on a Little Big Wheel.

He is a regular exhibitor at Hawaii collectors shows, and some of his toys are also for sale at Surf ‘N Hula Hawaii, a vintage collectibles and Hawaiiana shop in Kaimuki. Cripps said part of the fun of collecting is finding a piece, owning it for a while and then passing it on to someone else who can enjoy it.

He travels two to three times a year in search of treasures to add to his collection.

"To be a toy collector, you have to go to the source of where things can be found," he said. "Part of it is the experience, the knowledge that you gain from your compatriots. It’s fascinating, some of the people that you meet."