I really got into metal figures as a young adult. I'm not quite old enough to have been aware of toy soldiers in the classic era, though I do remember seeing a display of Britain's Deetail figures in the toy department at Hess' in Allentown when I was 4 or 5.
As a kid, I played with plastic army men, cowboys & Indians, and GI Joes, and built models. By the time I was in high school, I had collected a couple of boxes of 1/72 and HO scale Atlantic and Airfix figures-Ancient Romans and Britons, Greeks and Trojans, and Napoleonics. That's when I first dabbled in casting, making plaster molds of some of the simpler figures, and melting tire weights for the lead. But I gave all of that up when I went to college.
Fast forward to my junior year in college, I'm living in Munich, and I find a set of homecast toy soldiers at a flea market. I bought them because they looked cool, but a couple of years after that, the first edition of Richard O'Brien's "Collecting Toy Soldiers" comes out, and I learn that the figures were cast from Schneider molds. I found an original bronze Schneider mold at a flea market, and armed with the info about dealers and clubs in O'Brien's book, I was off to the races! I learned about Prins August and bought their molds, and I started going to shows, joined the MFCA, and eventually came full circle, picking up scale modeling again as a complementary hobby to the toy soldiers. And with the spread of the Internet, I wound up here and in other forums.
Prost!
Brad