ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, December 4, 1996 TAG: 9612040010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
BEFORE there was Toys "R" Us, there were toys by us.
For as long, probably, as men have whittled and women sewed (or vice versa), we have made toys all by ourselves. Trains, wagons, stick horses, sock dolls. Paper airplanes. Sleds and boats and monkeys-on-a-string.
``Folk Toys and Amusements,'' an exhibit at Ferrum College's Blue Ridge Institute and Museum, has those toys and many more. All were made in Virginia's mountain counties.
Assembled from private collections or borrowed from the builders themselves, ``Folk Toys'' chronicles nearly two centuries of playful life. The earliest - a pair of ice skates from Rockingham County - date from 1820. Several were made this year.
In between are more than 100 others. Collectively, they remind us that long before our toys were assembled by machines and sold in vast sheds with clever names, man had the capacity to amuse himself.
He has it still.
``It's something that everyone who comes in can relate to,'' said Roddy Moore, director of the institute. ``People walk out of there with a smile on their face.''
There are pea shooters and bottle dolls. Hoops and sticks and whirligigs. There is a toy rifle made from pine in 1840, and a wagon made from a Dr Pepper crate in 1973. Pull toys and paddle boats, homemade clay marbles and a 120-year-old top.
There are scores of dolls, made out of everything from twigs to bottles. And Dancing Dans - flat wooden dolls with workable joints, and all of them with black faces. Clearly popular - there are six here, the earliest made by an unknown Wythe County carver in the 1880s, the latest by a Ferrum craftsman in 1996 - the dolls are a little unnerving, recalling black minstrel shows and their caricatures by whites in blackface.
But folk culture, for better and worse, knows no modern liberal pieties. Most of these toys, however modern, are rooted in an unquestioning past - a past when toys weren't educational or meant to be, and a child was lucky Christmas morning to find even one.
Although the Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogs of the turn of the century already offered plenty of toys for sale, Moore said, they were beyond the reach of many in these hills.
``Christmases were very simple,'' said the Institute's assistant director, Vaughn Webb. ``A lot of people couldn't afford factory toys. They were making them because there were no other toys they could afford.''
Some are frankly designed for mischief. A hollowed-out gourd from Franklin County contains a painted aluminum snake that stares out at the viewer. The snake is attached to a hidden string in the back of the gourd. Should the viewer yield to temptation and put a hand inside, a tug on the string will make the snake lunge downward for a harmless ``bite.''
One of Moore's favorites is one of the simplest - a long piece of supple wood, pointed at one end, for skewering green apples. The stick is then snapped forward like a whip, making the apple a missile.
Moore has spoken to Leonard Rorrer, the Lee County man who made it. ``He said the momentum on the apple was just tremendous. ... I would love to have known about it when I was a kid.''
The apple thrower is not the only item in the show to lack decoration or frills.
In fact, some of the toys were made from apparent refuse. Socks, rags, bits of paper, scraps of tin, buttons, broom handles, rubber bands, string and bottle caps. In the old days, apparently, one man's trash was another man's building material.
In the end, you couldn't call all 121 of these toys art.
But, as Moore said, ``They're all toys.''
``Art's in the eye of the beholder,'' he said. ``We weren't looking for works of art. We were just looking for toys.''
The exhibit does more than show us toys from the past. It proves that the toy-making impulse is with us still. Included are some modest offerings from local schoolchildren - including the venerable paper airplane, made (presumably during lunch hour) by one Nick Huff of Ferrum Elementary School.
School mates Lori Thompson and Jessica Davis, meanwhile, donated a fortune teller to the exhibit.
Fortune tellers, for those who have forgotten, are made from a piece of notebook paper. They look like a pointy-topped mushroom without the stem. Four fingers go underneath, to flap the mushroom open and closed several times, according to some arcane formula, then at last the mushroom opens wide to reveal a fortune beneath a flap of paper.
Two possibilities from the Thompson-Davis fortune teller: ``I love you,'' and ``You have won a car.''
Speaking of cars, ``Folk Toys'' doesn't exclude older kids. In the front room there are three toys for grown-ups: a waist-high steam locomotive that works, a customized 1945 Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a hot rod made from a 1932 Ford roadster.
``Toys are for people of all ages,'' Moore said. ``The collectors today of dolls are not children, but adults. Adults make toys for themselves, too.''
Moore - who owns two hot rods himself - ought to know.
In fact, he and a friend were chatting recently about buying hot rod parts, the Institute director recalled. ``We were exchanging stories about the best deals we got with our AARP cards.''
LENGTH: Long : 112 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: NHAT MEYER/Staff. 1. This mini-locomotive and tenderby CNBwere made by Owen Short of the Shenandoah Valley town of Luray. 2.
Ferrum College Blue Ridge Institute Assistant Director Vaughn Webb
stands among dolls from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s that have
been collected for the institute's "Folk Toys and Amusements"
exhibition. 3. This 1945 customized Harley-Davidson motorcycle - a
toy for a big boy? - is owned by Ralph Watts of Roanoke. 4. This
Noah's Ark menagerie was carved from pine around 1900 in Rockingham
County. 5. A more recent folk toy is the 1973 Dr Pepper wagon
contributed by J.C. Hubbard of Franklin County (above). color. 6.
Botetourt County, Galax, Roanoke County and other Western Virginia
localities are represented in a display of doll houses that were
built from the 1890s to the 1960s. 7. Doll house-sized chairs were
made from bottle caps (top left) in the 1940s and roots (second from
right on top row) in the early 1900s, as well as carved woods.