A Million-Dollar Toy Story

It was the perfect place for a fairy tale to begin--in a massive warehouse filled with toys for needy children. It is there where, among shelves of dolls and teddy bears, tractors and trucks, in a dusty, forgotten box, a treasure was discovered.

Then another. And another. “Could it really be?” thought Esther Martinez.

She brought in experts, and one by one they examined the contents of the boxes, punched the buttons on their calculators and rubbed their chins.

“Nineteen thousand dollars,” said the first.

Not too bad, thought Martinez, but then as more and more experts came, the estimated value of the treasure went up and up, like a beanstalk rising through marshmallow clouds.

The final figure: Perhaps $1 million. Perhaps more.

The Los Angeles County Toy Loan Program, the nation’s biggest and oldest program of its kind, will auction off a cache of original Barbies still in their packages, toys made of cast-iron and wood that date back to the 1930s and 1940s, Disney memorabilia and Star Wars stuff by the wheelbarrow-full. A date has not been set, but the auction is planned for early next year.

Martinez, director of volunteer and special programs for the county’s Department of Public Social Services, says there could be a series of auctions to avoid diluting the market. She hopes the windfall can be used to fund and expand the toy program.

The toys were discovered two years ago by staff workers who were taking inventory in preparation for a move from the Humboldt Street warehouse to its current location at the Department of Public Social Services building on South Grand Avenue.

Some of the toys were found in boxes, and others were pulled off the shelves.

Martinez pulls out a Barbie doll head from a box and holds it between her thumb and index finger.

“Fifty bucks per head,” she says. “There’s probably 50 in a box. We have hundreds of boxes. Kids at the centers were sticking these on their pencils like erasers before we learned they were valuable.”

And that’s not all.

“We also have Ken heads,” she says.

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The history of the county’s toy-loan program dates to the summer of 1934, when two boys were caught stealing toys and other items from a store in southwest Los Angeles. It wasn’t a particularly grievous crime, not exactly the stuff of Torrio and Capone; but it was a crime that had far-reaching and lasting effects.

It seems that the boys’ families, like many families during the Depression, barely had money for food, let alone toys. The community decided that children needed both.

With start-up funds provided by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Project Administration, the Toy Loan Program took form, allowing children to borrow toys in the same manner as they might borrow books from a library. The first center opened May 6, 1935, in a garage near Manchester Park.

The program operates today about the same as it always has. There are 41 centers throughout the county, most in churches or community centers, all staffed by volunteers. The program has more than 40,000 toys, all donated. In 1999, toys were checked out more than 29,000 times.

It is one of about 300 such programs in the nation and is the only big-city program funded by local government, says Judith Iacuzzi, executive director of the Illinois-based USA Toy Library Assn. The Los Angeles program operates on a $75,000 budget, most of which goes toward salaries.

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Twenty-five years ago, Beatrice Smith-Halliberton opened a toy-loan center at the Mona Park recreation center. She still watches over it and the children who come here to play. Cameron Jackson, 5, is pushing a toy truck across the floor, over a doll, under a table, up the leg, then across the bottom of the table.

“It saves the adults from having to go out and buy toys, so they can use that money for food or clothing,” she says of the program. “It’s important to the children because it helps them learn responsibility. It’s important that kids learn not to break things up.”

That’s an aspect of the program that has been stressed over the years. As an incentive, if a child returns toys on time and in good shape 20 times, a special toy is awarded for the child to keep.

Twins Anthony Reyes and Esther Benquechea, 45, of Whittier still have theirs.

Reyes, a video production specialist for the county, still has the pale-green Buddy L truck/camper he chose as an award in 1963. Benquechea, executive secretary for the county coroner’s office, has

two dolls and a tea set.

She found them three years ago when her mother died. As she was going through her mother’s things, she found the certificates and the toys stored in a hope chest. Her mother kept the toys hidden, says Benquechea, and only let her play with them on special occasions.

They and their younger brother, Michael Reyes, 43, a barber in La Habra, were raised by their mother, an office clerk, and never knew their father. The toys, they say, serve as reminders of hard, yet happy, times.

Their mother would leave early on Saturday mornings and go to rummage sales and return with clothes for the children that didn’t always fit, toys that didn’t always work. At one point, things were so bad she had to sign up for public assistance. When told how much money she was to receive, she told the man it was too much and asked for only half the amount.

As the brothers and sister look back, they are more likely to remember the good times, the things they had rather than what they lacked. Benquechea, who was painfully shy as a child, remembers tea parties with her dolls, who knew all her secrets and fears. Anthony Reyes recalls pushing the truck around the yard. Michael Reyes remembers climbing the apricot tree in front of their home to view the world through a pair of binoculars he borrowed from the program.

How much difference can a toy make in a child’s life?

“We never had anything new,” Benquechea says as she gently lifts the cover from her tea set and carefully raises a cup. “Just these toys.”

It’s hard to put a price on that.

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When the toys discovered in the county warehouse are auctioned early next year, buyers will arrive from all over the country, says Max Fraley of Fraley Auctioneers in Costa Mesa. Fraley is under contract with the county and will conduct the sale.

He says he expects a mixture of collectors and investors. There might even be a few people looking for a specific toy they remember from childhood. Competition could be steep.

The value of rare toys has been driven up, says Fraley, by Internet auctions, but there’s also something innately human that accounts for the rising interest in all things collectible. “Man has an inner desire to search out,” he says. “It’s a form of adventure.”

While collectors will get one thing out of the old toys, future clients of the toy-loan program will get another. The revenue might allow the program to purchase a “toy mobile,” Martinez says, a way of reaching more children.

“We need to take care of our kids’ health, education, all those important things,” says Martinez. “But sometimes we forget about the importance of play. This is part of their natural growing up. It’s part of being a child.”

With Christmas coming, Martinez knows some of the toys being loaned out will be wrapped as presents and placed under trees. Not all of them will be returned to the program.

She hopes the auction will provide money to buy more. Besides, beneath a tree on Christmas morn is not such a bad place for a fairy tale to end.

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For more information on the Los Angeles Toy Loan Program, call (213) 744-4344.