I am an avid cook and BBQ enthusiast and I have always been prone to using and collecting the old Chicago Cutlery knives that my Mom and grandmother both used. I currently possess something like 200+ Chicago Cutlery knives, including many of the old 1920's-1940's carbon steel guys, as well as a very nearly completed collection of their later stainless knives, and I constantly haunt both the thrift stores and ebay in my never ending search for rarer CC knives.
Of course, I also collect old Green River, Foster Bros., Dexter & Russell, Case XXX and many other great older brands of American-made kitchen knives, but I grew up using Chicago Cutlery and that's what still feels best in my hands. Something about the nice edge that old virgin, carbon steel takes, as well as the beautiful feel of old, well oiled American hardwood handles (you just can't beat the feel of a well oiled, walnut handle on an old CC knife), just feels much, much better to me than the manufactured, characterless feel of a stainless, newer, non-American-made knife.
Additionally, I always find it kind of amusing when I talk about knives with folks I know (as I am wont to do), and often find them smug in their beliefs that their popular new Henkels 4 star or Wusthof classic knife sets are the best cutlery that any fellow could possibly ever own, because in my experience, such popularly marketed, newer, foreign-interloping knives just don't measure up to the performance and feel that a nice older American, hard-wood handled knife will give you, and sadly, many of my best knives cost me a helluva lot more than the latest international, recycled steel knives that a lot of folks look at as prestige, status items, anyway...
Here's about 1/5th of my Chicago Cutlery collection (along with a nice big Foster Bros. calf-splitter at the bottom)
