I forgot to add earlier that the Monogram M48 was my first armor kit, and was my first attempt at a diorama... It came with the tip sheet of "How to Build Dioramas" by Shep Paine. It was a dio of the M48 in an urban combat setting, likely the city of Hue during the '68 Tet Offensive (although the sheet never stated exactly where and when, it was about the only setting that made sense)... Shep had also used the M-60 gunner from the Monogram Infantry set.. The "Short Timer", "Peace" sign, and "Flower Power" decals and added a few "drips" of white paint to the decals to make 'em look more "crew applied"...
A lot of "firsts" with kit for me, and I still have the lower hull and roadwheels around here somewhere... First armor kit, first diorama, first figure conversions, first rattle-can paint-job, to name a few... Been totin' it (well, what's left of it) around the world in my spares box for the better part of 35 years, lol... I built a winter diorama with it, using flour for the snow, after spreading on some glue and sprinkling gravel over the glue... It wound up in other dioramas as well for a few years, until it had so many coats of paint on it that it was starting to change shape, lol...
I didn't have access to anything remotely resembling a hobby shop in those days (about 1974 or so) and had to make do with what I could scrounge up around the yard and neighborhood... I also didn't get a kit very often, so I used the same models over and over in different dioramas I built afer getting tired of looking at the last one. It finally culimated in a massive table-top sized dio that featured the Patton, the Monogram Lee, Monogram Halftrack, and the Tamiya M113, along with the Monogram StuG IV and a couple of German infantry and Afrika Korps sets all in the same battle, with guys fighting the Germans both with weapons and hand-to-hand... Think I had some of the "Green Army Men" in there as well... (I got the Tamiya kits as gifts from a cousin who lived in a town with a "real" hobby shop... The kits I bought were at the grocery store back in those days, and a few at the drugstore, which was the only place you could buy model paints in town.)
Thanks for bringin' back a pleasant memory, Bob...