Museum toy exhibit

Bruce Fox has always been a collector. Growing up he collected arrowheads and baseball cards. As an adult, he was working at a Woolco store in Texas, when he found himself gravitating towards the toy aisle. That was where he met the salesman for a growing company. It was the start of a career as well as a collection.

“Fisher-Price was the Cadillac of toy companies,” Fox said, and they were growing. He went to work in sales with only a sales pad and a pencil, and traveled all over the southwest. Eventually, he worked with every account Fisher-Price serviced, except for Target. He received two lifetime achievement awards and became the company historian. He has published two books about the company.

Fisher-Price was always innovative, he said. They developed the first toy lab and helped develop safety standards for preschool toys. In fact, it was founder Herb Fisher’s mother, a kindergarten teacher, who coined the phrase “preschool toy.”

The company creed included good value, strong construction and active play.

“It was a lot of fun. I loved the job,” Fox said.

Fox’s collection started not long after he started work for the company. He was visiting a wholesaler who had a wall of Fisher-Price toys on display. It wasn’t a large business. The wholesaler didn’t deal in large numbers. He sold the toys a few at a time to small stores. Fox noticed he was still displaying a toy that was no longer produced. The wholesaler took the toy out of the display and Fox offered to buy it. He paid the price that any small dealer would pay for that toy and it became the corner stone of his collection

He has over 500 Fisher-Price toys in his collection. He used to have more, but he downsized by limiting himself to only the wooden toys. Most of the wooden toys were produced before 1964 when plastics started taking over.

Many are pull, or in some cases, push toys, but all have more than one function. There are Disney characters banging drums or driving trains with moving parts. There are circus trains that come apart so the animals can play on a teeter totter. Each of the pull toys makes a noise when it moves.

Fisher-Price produced a catalogue of their products each year, so early on Fox found a copy of every catalogue and copied it on a xerox machine. He put his copies in a binder so he could easily look up a toy and know what it was worth.

When he was transferred to the mid-Atlantic states, he started visiting flea markets and realized there were a lot of toys out there. Fisher-Price had begun outside of Buffalo, N.Y., and didn’t ship past the Mississippi for years. The east coast was a “bonanza” of toys.

“No one knew what they had,” he remembered.

He had only worked for the company for eight years, but he had developed a reputation as a collector when he was asked to do a slide show for Fisher-Price retirees. The group was called the Silver Dollar Club because Fisher-Price paid their profit sharing in silver dollars. He photographed his collection and arranged his slides chronologically. He was a hit.

“I had a career-long side job after that,” he said. He was asked to work on a book along with a professional photographer. In 1987, he signed 3,000 copies of the book in three days. It took another three days for his hand to uncramp.

In 2005, he was asked to be the spokesperson for the company’s 75th anniversary. After a short course in public relations, he spent a morning doing 17 live television spots that showed all over the country.`

Fox and his wife, Becky, moved to Bella Vista in 2003. He was senior director of sales in a territory that included Walmart. By the time he retired in 2009 they loved the area and decided to stay.

In 2001, he wrote his second book, but this time Becky was helping. Instead of the professional photographer, they shot all their own photos in the basement with their first digital camera. This book celebrates company milestones, including the war years when Fisher-Price factories stopped producing toys so they could produce items for the military.

“There’s no such thing as a new toy,” Fox said, looking over the exhibit of wooden pull toys, “There’s just new technology.”

Lynn Atkins/The Weekly Vista Bruce Fox will be signing copies of his second book about Fisher-Price toys when he delivers a presentation about his collection of toys at the museum at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 15. Admission is free.

Lynn Atkins/The Weekly Vista Fisher-Price started with wooden pull or push toys, but each toy had more than one function. A local Bella Vista man has been collecting toys for over 30 years and has a small portion of his collection on display at the Bella Vista Museum.