Museum toys recall the past
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BY ART HOVEY/Lincoln Journal Star
Supposedly, people get too old to want to play with the toys that once made their eyes bulge and their child-sized fingers tremble with Christmas joy.
Ask them, though, about their all-time favorite finds under the tree and watch their normal adult facades melt away. Listen to their voices take on a wistful tone, examine their faraway looks, and go ahead and wonder if there’s a part in all of us that never grows up.
For Deb Arenz, now 38 and the mother of two starry-eyed Christmas wishers ages 4 and 6, the toy that defined her childhood play was a “Dressy Bessy” doll. It came covered with all the buttons, zippers and laces that little girls need to learn how to manipulate.
Jan Livingston Brady, 52, entered the world just in time to experience the start of the Barbie doll costume craze in Lincoln in the late 1950s.
And long before he became a big guy wielding a big hammer at a Gresham blacksmith shop, Walter Schmitt was a little guy cruising across the town’s sidewalks on his new scooter.
Now he’s 94, but long ago . . .
“I’d spend the entire day scooting from one end to the other, one extreme end to the other,” said Schmitt.
As is so often the case, young Walter didn’t realize he needed one of those leg-powered scooters until a friend got one. “I envied that friend of mine,” the adult Walter said with a smile from his wheelchair at Utica’s Community Care Center.
“You aren’t supposed to do that, but I did.”
Whether you ripped away the wrapping on Christmas Eve or on Christmas morning, here’s a guess that you remember your favorite, too.
Among the treasures
Apart from being a mom and a toy lover, Deb Arenz is the keeper of some of the finest toys ever to ignite the imaginations of Nebraska children in the first half of the last century.
Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy dolls, Lionel trains, and a miniature cast iron cooking stove are among the treasures Arenz keeps on display as a curator at the Nebraska Museum of History in downtown Lincoln.
Tinker Toys, a Magic Lantern that projected pictures on a wall and a 1914 push car that you sat in and pushed along with your feet are also part of the attraction for other never-grow-old toy lovers.
A computer search reveals that there are almost 6,000 toys at the museum in all, although only a portion of them are on display on a given day.
In what she describes as “the cycle of buy, buy, buy,” Arenz doesn’t claim to remember most of what was in her own toy boxes. But she’ll never forget her own children’s “lovies,” the stuffed toys that they take to bed.
“Those are the things that parents keep forever and eventually give to a museum if their kids don’t want them.”
Brady, born in Hastings, raised in Lincoln, and now living in Brookville, Ohio, is one of those donors to the Nebraska Museum of History over the last 15 years.
She’s also a former curator at the Wayne County Historical Museum in Richmond, Ind.
All things considered, “I have this deep-seated obligation within me to put things into the places where they belong,” Brady said. “And that kind of motivates me as I find I no longer want to carry the baggage from childhood around.”
Her home state of Nebraska has her doll highchair and doll buggy. Visitors to the Lincoln museum can see her brother’s toy tractors and manure spreader.
That’s not to say that getting past her attachment to some of her favorite toys was easy.
Along with all things Barbie, she clung steadfastly to her Annie Oakley costume. Her Christmas-inflamed imagination lifted her out of the winter grayness in Lincoln, Nebraska, and into Oakley’s starring role in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show.
She loved that outfit. “I wore it for three days straight and my mom finally made me take it off. I cried myself to sleep that night.”
Then, and in earlier generations, one of the reasons for such a strong attachment might have been the thin wallets of many parents.
As children thumbed through the toy sections in mail order catalogs, and as Christmas expectations rose to fever pitch, “you drooled and you drooled and you drooled and you maybe got one thing.”
In that less prosperous time, children also learned to appreciate parental advice about rough treatment of a new gift. “I think we were a lot more careful with them, because if you broke them, you didn’t get a new one.”
Catalog temptations
Back at the Museum of Nebraska History, Arenz pulls out a couple of the hefty publications that helped generations of children focus their toy desires.
The 1895 Montgomery Ward catalog tempts aspiring cooks with the compact version of a cast-iron stove. Your parents could buy you one for $2.
The 1930 Sears Roebuck catalog offers pop guns for 48 cents each, a 70-piece Tinker Toy set for 69 cents, and a doll buggy for $2.47.
A larger version of the doll buggy is $4.98.
Does Arenz feel tempted to pass judgment on the toys sold then versus the toys sold now?
Well, maybe a little. “There are a lot of toys on the market now that are not well made,” she said. “And they don’t require as much imagination.”
On the other hand, she acknowledges that many kids, including her daughter, like video games “that require skills that I don’t have.”
There’s something to be said for sharpening hand-eye coordination.
Video games, of course, are not the toys that Walter Schmitt and other residents at the Utica Community Care Center remember most fondly.
Frank Vrbka, 85, whiled away his playtime on a Utica area farm with a cast-iron toy tractor.
It was enough to satisfy him, and it had to be enough, because his parents also were buying gifts for two sisters and four brothers.
When the time came to open presents in the late 1920s or early 1930s, that tractor was “probably it,” Vrbka said. “There was not as much money.”
Geneva Pratt, also part of a big farm family near Coleridge, and later near Dunbar and Nebraska City, grew up playing with wooden blocks and Tinker Toys.
“We didn’t have a lot of toys, you know,” said the 97-year-old Pratt.
But her absolute favorite was a china doll she got from her German-born grandmother.
“She came and stayed with us when I was born because I was the first grandchild.”
The china doll, fitted out with new hair and new clothes, now resides in a glass cabinet at her daughter’s house.
As with so many other people speaking of their favorite childhood things, Geneva Pratt turns wistful as she thinks about her doll.
“I hated to give it away,” she said, “but when you’re 97 years old, you’re not going to be here very long.”
Reach Art Hovey at 523-4949 or at ahovey@alltel.net.
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