Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
KELLEY BENHAMWith no insurance and little hope of rebuilding, a widow tries to gather what Charley left behind at Santa's workshop.
FORT OGDEN - The sign was already worn, before the wind came. It still says Santa's workshop, but the part that said the toys were made by hand is around here somewhere in the dirt.
A little girl in red is picking toys from the rubble. Here's a purple airplane, there's a cow.
"Here's a horsey," she says, cheerful as a summer day. But the sky is bruised and rumbling, a lot like yesterday, when the hurricane came.
This place belonged to Chris Williams. He didn't live to see it blown apart. He died in March, of cancer, at age 74. Those are his tools lined up on the pegboard. That's his saw where the window blew in. That's his chair covered in glass. He made every one of those toys, scattered now in the splinters of the shop, tossed across the yard, wet with rain.
That's his widow, Dolores, standing on what used to be one of the walls, staring at what is left of the things he left behind.
"My husband died, you know," Mrs. Williams says.
After he died, she kept coming to the shop. Some days there are customers, some days there are none.
Today there are just three children with their grandpa. They have played with Mr. Williams' toys for years. They are salvaging what they can.
"When Christmastime comes, we're not going to have too much," Mrs. Williams says. "Going to be mighty few."
Yesterday, she locked the door and went home to wait out the storm with a fresh batch of cookies. She didn't worry much. The building is 100 years old and has seen some powerful winds. It used to be the general store, back when Fort Ogden was the county seat, before Arcadia sprang up to the north.
She peeked out at the hurricane in amazement as part of a patio roof blew by. She didn't really know how bad it was until she returned to the store that evening, down the road that used to be Main Street. She found a train compartment turned on its side. The house next door, which used to be the town's hotel, was showing sky through the roof.
Then she saw the toy shop. It hurt to look.
* * *When their kids were small, Chris Williams tried to build a toy box. The corners wouldn't hold together. He finally threw the thing away.
It was years before he became skilled with a saw. After serving in the Air Force, he took a job building mobile homes, then he started making children's furniture, and eventually he devoted himself to toys. His stepfather never let him play with toys when he was a kid, so he surrounded himself with them later on.
He was a different kind of Santa, particular and occasionally gruff. Kids were a little scared of him, at least at first.
He liked his tools lined up just right and his screws tucked neatly into their plastic drawers. He liked to paint the cars, trucks and planes himself. He knew just how they ought to look. Dolores painted the other toys upstairs.
"We had a communication system," she says. "He'd take a long stick and bang on the ceiling. I'd come out to the porch to see what he wanted. If he wanted me, I'd toot down.
"Long as I stayed in my place and he stayed in his, we'd get along fine."
She asked him once why he was such a grouch. He said people might take advantage of him if they knew his real nature. She thought he was a softie inside.
"He cared about kids," she says. "If anybody wanted any help, he'd be right there to do it.
"I was ready for 50 more years."
Most of their customers were tourists, but they had some regulars. The hottest-selling items were the children's names carved in wood. He loved to make trains, and he turned the tiniest scraps into cars. But slowly the kids quit coming.
"They're buying electronic junk, you know," Mrs. Williams says. "And with all the bad things going on in the world, they aren't spending as much as they used to."
Mr. Williams used to grumble about these things. Kids have no imagination, he would say.
Sometimes it was just the two of them all day. They worked six days a week and celebrated their 50th anniversary in February. But by then, the chemotherapy was wearing him down. The week he died, he asked her to bring him into the shop.
"He drilled a bunch of these here yard ornaments, and I pounded the rods in," she says. "He didn't have the strength to do it."
She starts to cry.
She can feel him still inside the shop. It is a man's place, paneled and dark. He made the signs out front, even the one that says "Beware of Dog." There never was a dog. That was just more of his bluster.
For a while, she couldn't stand to be in the shop without him. Then she came back and opened for business. He left boxes of carved pieces that are not yet painted. She works to finish them.
She does not try to use his saw.
* * *She did not look long at the building the night it blew apart. She broke down in the yard and cried herself numb, and a neighbor took her home.
She lives nearby "at the end of the street, the place where there ain't no trees anymore" in a frame house that stood up to the storm.
When morning came, she went to the shop and started picking through the mess by herself.
She's still at it when a neighbor comes by and informs her that down the road at the Methodist church the pews are scattered and the pastor is missing.
"Did he blow away?" Mrs. Williams asks.
"He's too big to blow away," Barbara Swartz says. "But I'll be a Baptist on Sunday."
"Oh good," says Mrs. Williams, already a Baptist herself.
They sit together in the front door and just look at the place. Something is stuck in the ceiling fan. The window frame has blown out. A big fan, 75 pounds at least, flew several feet through the air and rests on a table saw.
Mr. Williams' workshop smells musty, not sweet and sawdusty like it used to.
She's glad he isn't here to see this. "It would've really took him down," she says.
Many of the toys can be salvaged. But the building wasn't insured. They knew the yellow pine would burn quick, and they couldn't afford the policy. She talks about rebuilding, but she doesn't know how. "I can't get a loan. I'll never make enough to pay it back."
The toy business isn't a living anymore. It's just a life.
* * *Toward evening, John Fales brings his grandkids by to help. He knew Mr. Williams for 15 years. He used to bring his grandkids and their friends here to pick out toys.
"They'd save their pennies and nickels," he says. Over the years they accumulated a red wagon, wooden blocks, flowers and ducks. A rocking horse has been passed from one grandchild to the next. They have a pink flamingo in their front yard. It survived the storm.
Alyssa Smith, the girl in red, has retrieved one just like it from the rubble. It has one wing left. On the ground are the hundreds of names. Anne, Cher, Christian, Clarice and Joy. And a green character named Larry Lettuce, grinning in the dirt. Oscar the Onion has a tear on his cheek.
Chris Smith, 13, stacks toys on shelves. He liked the piggy bank Mr. Williams made when he was small, and though the man seemed mean, even a kid could see through it most of the time. "He was really nice," Chris says.
The place where he's standing used to be inside, but it has collapsed in on itself like Mr. Williams' first toy box. The front door fell in. Part of the roof blew into the tree branches. The rest collapsed at an angle. The toys, which had been lined up on shelves and table displays, shot out into the wind.
Rain is coming. A rooster is crowing. Alyssa is scooping up a birdhouse, a purple truck, stepping over the names of children who may or may not exist. Roc, Broderick, Amberley, Tyrone, Shelli and Dan.
On the floor, which used to be the wall, is a business card.
Chris Williams
Toymaker
Next to it is a wooden pair of fat red legs, wearing boots. All that's left of Santa Claus.
- Kelley Benham can be reached at 727 893-8848 or benham@sptimes.com