McLEANCOUNTY HISTORY & GENEALOGY NEWS
By Euleen Rickard
On Friday after Thanksgiving the country went into a frenzy of buying and there were record sales for Christmas merchandise. Television reports showed long lines of people waiting for stores to open where they would buy the most popular toys, the latest electronics and the bargains that had been advertised. I was still in a Thanksgiving mood and thinking of the olden days and the toys that were received and treasured in earlier times.
An article in one of the magazines called “Christmas on the Farm” caught my attention and it reminded me of an historic farm in Bath, Ohio that I had visited. It was there that I found James (Jim) McEuen, a McLean Countian acting as Geppetto, the story book toy maker.
Jim McEuen grew up in the Poplar Grove area, attended school in McLean County and graduated from Western State Teachers college in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He taught mathematics and coached basketball at Sacramento High School from 1937 to 1940 when he was called to serve in the army during World War II. After the war he taught one year at Sacramento High, then left to marry a West Virginia native and settle in Cuyhoga Falls, Ohio. Both were educators, she a librarian and he a teacher of Ohio history. They had two daughters.
After retirement he and his wife Harriet got involved in the restoration of the Hale Farm that is now a living history museum and village depicting life in Ohio in the mid-1800s. Harriett was the village head guide and Jim worked as a handyman, later becoming an interpreter and toy maker.
Jim, in period clothing, worked three days a week in the toy shop giving children and their families lessons about Ohio’s early life. He was a carver and whittled what he called “Appalachian toys” that were sold in the gift shop. Those toys of old were “pecking birds and chickens, whimmy diddles, idiot sticks, gee-haws and jumping jacks.” The jumping jack toy dates back to the 1600s.
As he sat in the toyshop, whittling a little flower from a stick of maple, he said, “I do not know which is the most fun, whittling and carving the toys or playing with the finished products.” When asked about how he made them he said, “I cut them out on a saw, smooth them up and thread them on a rope, making several at a time. I have been hung up on old toys, making climbing bears for the gift shop for years, don’t ask me how many I have made, because I don’t remember.”
At Christmas time he hosted “Breakfast with the Toy Maker.” There, children had breakfast, learned of the Christmases of the olden days and watched the “Toy Maker” in action. The little wooden flowers that he whittled were given to the children. Others of his toys sold in the gift shop.
The young Jim McEuen that we knew, the one who played in the donkey basketball games at Sacramento High School, who skated brilliantly around the Sacramento skating rink, who dated the young home economics teacher, in his older days had become a well known toy maker in Ohio. With snow white hair and beard and dressed in his blue vest with red tie and loose fitting, gathered at the knee pants, he looked very much at home in the world of 1800s.
Jim McEuen died in April 2001. He spent twenty years making toys that through the years have fascinated and entertained children and adults; the McLean County native and those old time toys, some of us will remember this Christmas.