FIXATIONS : In Their Home, It’s Hard to Separate Den From the Toys
Remember when adults were adults? Before the days of “He who dies with the most toys wins” bumper stickers, there was a time when grown-ups did grown-up things, incomprehensible to children. Things never blew up much in the movies parents watched, which instead just had people talking and kissing, without even the prospect of a brain-shaped monster with huge pincers livening up the conversation. Being an adult meant going to work in a gray suit in a boxy car, talking about NATO and the PTA, and getting one’s recreation from a golf cart or a bottle.
Now, of course, adults careen about in 4x4 monster trucks with Nirvana blasting from the stereo. They dress in trendy neon gym-wear, attend movies where cars, heads and high-rises blow up as a matter of course. And they don’t seem to give a damn if the whole world knows they play with wind-up toys.
William and Barbara Carr have toys the way some people have termites--thousands of them, in practically every room of their house and filling the loft of their four-car garage. The chief infestation, though, is in a former bedroom of their two-story house.
When William opens the door and switches on the lights to their toy room, the effect is rather like suddenly waking up on the Las Vegas Strip. The walls are lined with mirrored-glass cases crowded with a riot of colorful toys from nine decades. Everywhere one looks are multiple images of Popeye, Mortimer Snerd, Mickey Mouse, Buck Rogers and other characters, waiting to be played with.
Unlike some toy collectors, Carr actually plays with his toys. Some of his vintage pieces are on loan to Fullerton’s Muckenthaler Cultural Center, and when he lectured there recently he demonstrated several of his pieces. Most of the toys shown in the center’s “Art Deco Toys” exhibit (running through March 1) are on loan from the Detroit Antique Toy Museum, which--in an apparent burst of adulthood--has forbidden the Fullerton staff from even winding the toys.
“The (Muckenthaler) curators had never actually seen the toys work,” Carr said, “so I brought 20 down and worked them and they thought it was the greatest thing ever.”
The interest in toys was spurred some 29 years ago, when Carr’s parents came out for a visit and brought him four tin wind-up toys from his childhood: a military drummer, Disney’s Dopey, Charlie McCarthy and B. O. Plenty.
“It was strange to have grown up, gone through the service, gotten married and all that, and have your past cough back up at such a late date. It didn’t take long to remember them, and I was pretty excited at the time,” Carr said.
Not long after that Barbara started surprising him with toys she’d pick up at the dime stores. After they had about 50, they figured they were collectors and started going to toy shows and antique shops.
Theirs is an egalitarian collection: recent toys worth $5 reside next to 70-year-old ones that might be worth the price of a small car. “If it inspires us, we want it. It doesn’t have to be rare,” Carr said.
His chief interests are Charlie Chaplin--to whom another room of the house is devoted--and stamped-tin wind-up toys like the ones from his childhood.
A collector/psychotherapist recently speculated for us that fixations are a way of filling a lack in one’s childhood. There may be a bit of that at work here.
Growing up in Huntington, W. Va., Carr recalled, “My parents weren’t wealthy, and we didn’t have that many toys. I can well recall having one pair of skates, which weren’t enough to go around for my brother and I, so we took the wheels and put them on 2-by-4s and made skate-scooters out of ‘em, so we’d each have one. Or we’d take those old-time barrel hoops and use a stick to roll them down the brick alleys.
“My brother got a used pedal car when he was 8 and I was so envious of him that he got the pedal car and I didn’t. He was older. I have a picture of him in it and I’m still (angry). I want a picture of me in that pedal car, because my brother is not intrigued by toys at all.”
Carr does have several vintage pedal cars now that he’s a tad too grown-up to fit in them. Other prizes in his collection include: a vintage stereoscope--like the ones in Disneyland’s penny arcade--featuring Chaplin; a wind-up where Popeye and Bluto whack each other in the ring; an Amos and Andy Open Air Taxi which lurches and shakes its occupants about; and a complex wind-up from 1929 called the Marx Merry Maker Band featuring musical mice that look suspiciously like Disney’s early Mickey. Speaking of toy maker Louis Marx, Carr opined, “He was probably one of the biggest innovators of stealing ideas that ever existed.”
His wife also has quite a collection, ranging over spaceman-themed toys (including an Atom Ray Gun water pistol), porcelain Cabbage Patch dolls, antique egg cups, Betty Boop characters and family heirlooms. Stored separately, she also collects cookbooks. “I rarely cook a recipe out of the dern things,” she said, “I read them as though they’re novels.”
A number of the items in Barbara’s collection come from William, and the reverse also is true.
“I enjoy collecting things but the most fun I’ve had is Bill finding a toy and deciding it’s more expensive than he should buy, and then me undermining him, going behind his back to buy it and surprise him with it at a later date,” she said.
She did that with one toy, a wind-up of old comic character Smitty on a scooter.
“Bill found it at a toy show and thought it was the most fantastic toy he’d ever seen, but too expensive. I got a check snuck to the lady dealer to have it sent to us. Then I told Bill, ‘Listen, if it’s a toy you really like, dang it, get it.’ He went back to her table and found it was sold, and came back with a face about three-feet long. I said, ‘See, that shows you that if you want something you should buy it right then or someone else will get it.’
“I put it away for Christmas or something special. But Bill came home from work in a real low mood one day, and I thought, ‘There’s nothing like a toy to pick Bill up.’ I sat him down and gave it to him, and it made his day.”
William owns an independent insurance adjusting company, while Barbara is a senior building inspector for the city of Irvine. While they have two grown children, they seem a good decade younger than they actually are. To them their ever-growing toy collection is just a reflection of their ongoing love affair.
“It wasn’t the toys that’s kept us thinking young,” Barbara said. “Even without them Bill and I would still be the energetic people that we are. We always put our younger friends to bed, and Bill and I keep on cooking, and I don’t think that’s blamed on the toys. I think it’s our outlook on life. Regardless of what that birth certificate says, it’s all in your head. I don’t think we’ll ever be old.
“That just comes from loving a lot, just loving someone a bunch and being able to love back in return, having the same morals and the same goals. Bill and I just make a heck of a good team, that’s all.”
