It began innocently enough. The Toyota obsession (or “sickness,” as he calls it). In 1993 Kerry Blalock promised his nephew, Eric Mason, a vehicle if he kept his grades C or higher. Shortly thereafter Blalock found Eric a 1974 Toyota Land Cruiser at Greenline Equipment. Someone had traded it in on a tractor.

The Greenline Toyota wasn’t Blalock’s first experience with the Land Cruiser. As a 10-year-old he had bounced through the woods in the back of one on a coon hunt. The experience, notably the vehicle, made a lasting impression.

In the nine months it took Mason to get his grades up, Blalock drove the Land Cruiser, and his appreciation for the vehicle deepened. He decided to restore it. For his academic efforts Mason got a Suzuki Samurai.

Those nine months were for Blalock an incubation period of a condition that has persisted for more than a quarter of a century and resulted in the purchase and/or restoration of pickup trucks, a sports car, SUVs and even a fire truck, all made by the Japanese automaker.

When he’s not tending his Toyota addiction or keeping check on local government, another subject he is passionate about, Blalock, 57, runs his wholesale-to-the-public clothing business.

Thursday morning Blalock and I sat on the front porch of his house located at the edge of an office park on Bluecutt Road and talked about his favorite subject. A strip of immaculately tended lawn separated us from an equally flawless driveway beyond which is a garage housing three jewel-like Toyotas.

These include an FJ75 Land Cruiser pickup, a Marine Corps issue and veteran of the Iraq war; a BJ45 Land Cruiser pickup used to haul grapes in a French vineyard and a perfect 1989 MR2 Toyota sports car, color red.

In the carport to our right, a recently acquired orange Blizzard, a small Jeep-like vehicle made for the Japanese market, shares space with his wife Denise’s white Lexus.

The Toyota fire truck is on display at Denise’s insurance office in East Columbus.

Why Toyota? Why not muscle cars? Corvettes? Vintage roadsters? Why these clunky, utilitarian beasts of burden?

“Durability,” Blalock said. “Toyota’s big thing is they over build.”

Blalock is not my first encounter with someone with an inexplicable attachment to the Land Cruiser.

My father, whose driving choices ranged from a Corvette to his mother’s well-worn Buick Electra 225, drove a two-toned (ocean blue and white) ’72 Land Cruiser (model J50) for years. The vehicle’s closest automotive kin is a John Deere tractor and is known to aficionados like Blalock as the iron pig.

As we talked Blalock flipped through pictures of Toyota trucks on his cell phone. There’s a photo of a camel sitting in the back of a pickup. Another with a machine gun manned by jihadist-looking fighters mounted in the bed of a pickup. In another, his BJ45 splashes through a mountain stream.

He nodded toward my dusty Tacoma and asked how many miles I had on it. About 120,000, I said. He tells of a Tacoma that ran for 1.2 million miles, though the truck required a new motor at 800,000.

And to think I’ve been considering trading.

As for the nephew who got the Samurai, Blalock found him a windowless 4-Runner that had been sitting for 10 years in an Amory junkyard. “Everything on it worked,” Blalock said. The nephew revived the Toyota.

Blalock locates his Toyotas on internet auction sites; through ih8mud.com, a website that caters to rock-crawling enthusiasts, an activity Blalock took up after giving up white-water kayaking; and from individuals who traffic in Japanese-made Toyotas.

He’s paid as little as $2,000 and as much as $20,000 for a vehicle. As for what he has spent restoring them, Blalock can’t say and doesn’t know. He purposefully doesn’t keep up with what he spends on a vehicle, he says. “If you’re going to do it might as well go on and do it.”

When I asked what’s next, Blalock said he’s content with his current inventory.

Then, after the briefest pause, he brings out his phone and scrolls to a picture of Toyota’s knock-off of the H1 Hummer, the Mega Cruiser and proceeds to explain the vehicle’s unique four-wheel steering system.

Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.