THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 24, 1996 TAG: 9601230109
SECTION: ISLE OF WIGHT CITIZEN PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY JODY R. SNIDER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ISLE OF WIGHT LENGTH: Long : 160 lines
JEFF BEDFORD'S TOY ROOM is typical of most boys' rooms.
Cars and trucks are parked on shelves.
Armies march across the room.
Submarines emerge from the depths.
Everywhere you look or want to step - toys.
But Bedford, 38, isn't a kid. And these toys aren't really playthings.
His toys are his passion.
In just one room upstairs in his Carrollton home are at least 600 toys, ranging from battery-operated spaceships to metal cars and trucks and a huge assortment of tin windup toys - a collection that spans seven decades and has taken him five years and thousands of dollars to accumulate.
``I can't wait when it comes to getting a new toy,'' he said recently, standing in the room of wall-to-wall relics. ``If it's something that I want, I'm going to get it. It doesn't matter what the cost is. You worry about how you're going to eat later.''
His most recent addition is a windup toy: a boy on a tricycle that turns figure eights, circa 1920 - and expensive. Just how expensive, he wouldn't say.
Bedford, a fuel-injection inspector at Siemens Automotive in Newport News, is married and has a 5-year-old son, John. He helps his father dust the toys and even gets to play with some of them.
And Bedford knows that one day the collection will be his son's - which, he says, is part of the attraction of collecting them.
Bedford is just one of many collectors who have been bitten by the toy bug, says Jim Abicht, owner of Smithfield Antiques Center and Antiques Emporium of Smithfield in downtown Smithfield.
``People buy what they remember,'' Abicht says. ``Like now, the most aggressive area of toy collecting is toys from the '50s and '60s. Those people have the spendable incomes.''
Abicht is a collector himself, looking for things that resonate with his own boyhood - and he has several that actually were his as a boy. And on the business side, toys are one of the principal parts of his enterprises.
But the toy bug bites different people in different ways.
Some want to recapture their youths or buy the toys they couldn't afford as children. Others collect because they like the artistry of a toy, or they do it as investments.
The true-blue collectors like Bedford collect for love.
And then there are collectors like Cornelius Duff. They don't buy. They keep what they have or what's been handed down to them.
He and his wife, Annie Lee, live in Isle of Wight County just across the line from Suffolk's Chuckatuck section.
Years ago, Duff, now 59, came across a stash of old toys in his grandmother's barn, and he loves to show off the family treasures he found. Among them: an 1886 wooden spelling puzzle that is 51 years older than he is; a 1916 counting game with colored, clay balls and a wooden board that entertained Duff's mother at age 10, when she was bedridden with typhoid fever.
And then there's Duff's own boyhood toys - a 1934 Lindstrome's Gold Star wooden pinball machine and a firecracker cannon that shoots a ball into the air once a firecracker is lit under the cannon's base.
``These are the simple toys,'' Duff says. ``The power was in the child's hands and mind. You played with what you could figure out, make and do. Children still love to play with them.''
For Duff, this collection is more than just a stash of old toys. It is a collection of childhood memories that could never be bought or sold.
``I wouldn't sell my toys for anything. They're priceless. They have great sentimental value because I played with them as a boy. Something that's lasted that long - you don't want to get rid of it.''
In fact, Duff likes the old toys so much that he makes reproductions for his six grandchildren.
``How many kids today can look at a toy they got for Christmas and know who gave it to them? My grandchildren will someday look at these toys and say, `Hey, granddaddy made this back in 1995.' I sign and date each one.''
He makes more reproductions than he has grandchildren, so he sells those. The wooden pinball machines go for $45. A tunneling man - a man that hangs in balance by two sticks and rolls back and forth on a wooden stand - sells for $25. Although Duff doesn't have that original boyhood toy, he remembers playing with one when he was a child.
He also has made one reproduction of the clay-ball counting game, but he says that game was too hard to recreate more than once.
``I don't really want to make another one of those,'' he says, shaking his head.
But with each reproduction he does make, Duff hopes children will learn something about the way toys used to be made years ago.
``You can go to the store and buy something - it's much easier to do. But these toys will last longer than anything you could buy.
``And for my grandchildren, the toys are something they can keep from me.''
During the Depression, many children had only a few special playthings.
Windsor resident Clarence Umphlette, 58, still has the shiny, red, pedal car his older brother, George, gave him for Christmas of 1939.
``It was the greatest toy I ever had in my whole life. We were poor people, and we just couldn't get ahold of anything. Then World War II came, and you just didn't get presents like that. I wouldn't take anything for it.''
Bedford knows the feeling.
``The toys I have now have probably changed hands 100 times, until they got to me. Few people really love toys so much that they wouldn't part with them. Most buy them as investments.
``Half of the toys I own, I wouldn't sell for anything. And the ones I do sell, I sell to buy better ones. When I find a toy in good condition, it's like finding a buried treasure. It's that exciting.''
The toy bug bit Suffolk resident David Snyder 20 years ago.
Snyder, 45, who moved to Suffolk six years ago after retiring from the Navy, also has devoted a room in his house to nothing but period toys, from the '20s through the '40s.
He has three metal pedal cars, an assortment of pressed-steel cars and trucks, lead dime-store figures - and about 70 toy submarines. It comes as no surprise, then, when Snyder says he retired as a senior chief petty officer on a submarine.
``I've always liked antique cars. And with the pedal cars, I don't have to worry about gas, insurance or a garage to store them in,'' he jokes, ``and they're still old cars.''
Snyder buys new toys two or three times a year, when he attends toy shows and auctions in Richmond.
``It's an addiction, but it's the most positive addiction I could have. It makes me feel good to stand in my room and look at all my toys.''
Serious collectors follow two simple rules, Snyder says: ``Buy what you like and like what you buy. And buy the best quality toy you can find because it will increase in value.''
But collecting toys can be as iffy as the stock market, Abicht says.
``The thing about toy collecting is that you never know what will become valuable. If everyone saves the same toy, it doesn't become valuable. It takes about 20 years before you realize if a toy has any value.''
And even then, sometimes you don't realize the true value of a toy - until it's gone.
Abicht attended an outdoor antique show in Pennsylvania several years ago and bought a wind-up toy roller coaster for $100.
He later sold it for $150. That man sold it for $250. The next buyer paid $600. And the next - $1,000.
Abicht says he has since learned that the toy is extremely rare.
And the man who has it today is asking $15,000.
For something they really want, Abicht says, ``People will pay a premium price.'' MEMO: [For a related cover story, see page 7 of The Citizen for this date.]
ILLUSTRATION: [Cover, Color photo]
CHILDHOOD REVISITED
Staff photo by JOHN H. SHEALLY II
Jeff Bedford and his son, John Thomas, look over the many, many toys
in their collection lining shelves in the loft of theis home.
Staff photo by JOHN H. SHEALLY II
Jim Abicht of Smithfield had a hand puppet as a child. Now he has
two to play with.
Staff photo by JOHN H. SHEALLY II
Jeff Bedford lost his cowboy guns and holsters when he was a boy.
His mother, Kathleen Bedford, found another outfit for her adult
son.
Staff photo by MICHAEL KESTNER
An old toy submarine in David Snyder's collection.
by CNB