Handcrafted Toys From Around the World Open New Vistas for Children

In Ghana, a child fashions a primitive “thumb piano” out of scrap metal, discarded wood and an old sardine can.

In Zaire, teen-age boys earn pocket money selling toy helicopters and buses made from cast-off wire.

In Brazil, a youngster creates a rattle using scrap wood, wire and bottle caps while a rubber plantation worker delights his children by molding tree sap into a tiny model alligator.

Christmastime is the season when American parents and children make the ritual trek to toy stores stocked with battery-powered robots, computerized dolls and video games that aim missiles at alien invaders.

But throughout much of the world, children and their parents still draw on ingenuity and meager resources to devise their play.

A New Gallery

Some of the most imaginative and intricate of these improvised playthings from around the world went on display at a new gallery at the Children’s Museum here, the world’s largest museum designed for children. Many of them were part of the Theresa and Frank Caplan collection, which was donated by the couple two years ago.

“Play is universal,” said Theresa Caplan who, with her husband and partner of 52 years, was in Indianapolis last week presiding over the debut of the new “Passport to the World” gallery. “If children don’t have a ball, they’ll pick up a stone. If they don’t have a doll, they’ll wrap a leaf or rag around a twig and make their own.”

For more than half a century, the Caplans have championed the importance of play. In 1950, they founded Creative Playthings Inc., whose products spearheaded a new era in toy development that stressed unstructured play and creative stimulation. The company quickly became one of the largest manufacturers and suppliers of education materials for the early childhood years.

Because small children live in an adult-scaled world, childhood can be frustrating, according to the Caplans. “Play must never frustrate a child. . . . (Creative Playthings) scaled down the world to make it child-sized,” said Frank Caplan, who translated child development and science principles into manageable playthings for schoolchildren that would build their self-esteem.

“Toys today are too finished, too polished,” Theresa Caplan added. “They’re like frozen dinners. What do you put into them?”

In addition to manufacturing playthings, the Caplans authored well-known guides, including “The Power of Play” and “The First Twelve Months of Life,” which urged parents and educators to take child play seriously and view it as an integral part of development. Fascinated by toys of all sorts, they traveled around the world gathering handcrafted toys and folk art objects that especially appealed to children.

Started 25 Years Ago

“The Caplans looked at other cultures with a rather childlike eye,” said Peter Sterling, director of the Children’s Museum. “When they started this collection 25 years ago, they looked at creativity, imagination, and play as a theme for collecting. They saw a universality that cut across cultural lines. And that’s where the collection makes wonderful sense to children.”

Over the years, the collection from more than 100 nations grew to more than 50,000 pieces. Theresa Caplan meticulously catalogued each piece, consecutively numbering every item and writing out a corresponding 3x5 index card noting the country of origin, type of artifact, price, and a short description. In time she filled hundreds of shoe boxes with these handwritten cards.

Though the materials and decorative detail of the toys varied from country to country, the Caplans almost always found common themes.

There are pull toys from nations as diverse as Egypt, Finland and Mexico. There are delicate handpainted silk kites from China and crude paper and wood kites from India. Intricately hand-cut and gold-leafed Indonesian shadow puppets contrast with unsophisticated, brightly painted finger puppets from Taiwan. There are masks from Africa, Asia and South America, and dolls from almost every continent.

Ron Gibson, with two part-time assistants, uncrated and shelved the 14,000 boxes of toys and objects that arrived from the Caplans’ hometown of Princeton, N.J.

A model from Sri Lanka features pecking peacocks. A Japanese variant on the theme depicts a circle of washer women pounding their clothes clean. In a Russian version a bear dances to the strumming of a balalaika player. In a German version a pianist furiously bangs the keys of a tiny piano.

Because music is found in every country, figures of musicians and musical groups abound. Visitors to the “Passport” gallery are invited to listen to the music of various countries through headphones as they look at a wood-carved marimba band from Mexico, a whimsical Guatemalan group made of wood and hand-woven fabric and musical groupings from other countries.

Began as a Hobby

The Caplan collection began as a hobby. As the couple traveled abroad, searching for goods to sell through their company Christmas catalogues, they would also stock up on interesting artifacts found along the way. Many were found in the workshops of artisans in out-of-the-way villages.

Soon, their home overflowed with the contents. By 1971, the sheer bulk of objects forced them to rent commercial warehouse space. When the mammoth collection arrived in Indianapolis it took staffers 10 months to unpack it onto a linear mile of shelving in the museum’s basement. And, almost overnight, the museum’s collection of artifacts doubled.

“The Caplans were lucky because they caught the world at the end of a time when handmade folk objects were really being made universally--when you could go to just about any country and there were things being produced by hand, not stamped out of plastic or metal,” said Sterling, who estimates the value of the collection to be in the millions of dollars.

“There are people who will say that this collection isn’t worthy of a museum because it consists of 20th-Century folk objects,” he added. “And from an art world point of view they’re absolutely right. But the Caplans weren’t collecting great works of art. They were collecting for another purpose--to open the world up and bring that world to children.”