He makes heirloom toys -- old-fashioned pull toys and wooden cars, to be exact -- using books of patterns and a creative eye he says he has had since childhood. With only a month before Christmas, the 75-year-old is in full swing, moving quickly from his band saw to his electric sander and drill press as the smell of wood chips fills the air. He whistles along as a radio plays old tunes from World War II.

"This is my "little corner of the world,' " he says with a grin after a song by the same title comes to a finish.

He glues a wooden headlight onto a toy Army Jeep and carefully twists the small piece so the grain runs horizontally. That's how headlights look in real life, he explains.

"I'm kind of a stickler for details," he says. "But it makes a difference. If I wasn't, things wouldn't turn out the way I want them to, the way I can see them in my mind."

The toys Sita makes are special to him for several reasons. They come from his own hand. They will go to children in need. And in the process, the retired Mr. Fix It gets satisfaction indescribable.

He has silver gray hair, twinkling eyes and an easy, jovial chuckle as he works in his shop. You can almost see visions of happy children dancing in his head. But don't call him Santa.

"Santa? Oh no. I'm an elf. A very old elf," he says with a laugh.

Of course, this elf is more than a gentleman who likes to fiddle with plywood and then donate his creations to charities every holiday season. There is a reason, a force, behind what he does.

Ask him why once, and he'll say "the kids."

Ask twice, and he'll say it keeps him busy, happy and out of his wife's hair. He and Anita met when she was 14 and he 17. They married, had four kids, worked. Now she has her Internet, and he has his tools.

Ask a third time why he does what he does -- every day, each day, fiddling until the sun goes down and supper is on the table -- and this normally private man will get a little quiet. He will pause, get a faraway look in his eye as he goes back to the late 1920s when he was a boy, the middle child of seven siblings raised by a mother on her own, widowed by two husbands who died young.

"We were poor," he begins. But that isn't the right way to describe it. Doesn't begin to tell the story. "If there was something poorer than poor, that was it."

Everything they had, was given to them by welfare. The out-of-style clothes he had to wear to the first day of seventh grade, first ashamed of the way they hung, later embarrassed by the holes in the elbows and knees. The one pair of shoes that he wore to gym class when everyone else wore sneakers. He remembers that coach fondly; he never asked Sita why he wasn't dressed properly.

And then there was the food. The sacks of flour and sugar. Containers of oatmeal, cans of evaporated milk. He and his sister would take the old wheelbarrow and walk 5 miles to the Meridan, Conn., city hall. They would show their ticket, load up and bring it home. Of that, he was never ashamed. They needed food too much.

As for Christmas, well, they didn't have much of one. No tree. No presents, unless the welfare people happened to come by. Sita remembers the first time they did, and he was given a used board game.

"It was the first toy I ever got, and it was broken. There was a piece missing," he recalled. "But it was great to me because otherwise, I wouldn't have gotten anything."

Today, as he makes his toys, Sita imagines a child's happiness at getting a brand new gift. Each piece has its own personality, a touch of whimsy. A grinning frog, a roaring dinosaur, a lobster, a monster truck, a choo-choo train. All wood, no paint. Sita likes to see the grain; it looks more natural that way.

Nearly everyone who has seen his toys tells Sita he should sell them, that he could make good money. No thanks. Why go to some flea market, he says, where a bunch of cranky old people are looking to get something for nothing? "I know what I put into these things. I know how much work it takes," he says. "With the most simple toy, the minimum time you could spend would be three hours. Some take 15, 20. These people want something for $3. No way. I get more satisfaction giving them to someone who will give them to a child."

Sita's grandchildren, particularly his youngest who are 10 and 5, have benefitted from his talent. So have children at a local church and a Shriner's hospital. This year, the eighth in a row that Sita has spent woodworking, he is donating them to the Hernando County Sheriff's Office, whose deputies will distribute them to needy families.

In the past three years, Sita estimates he has crafted between 300 and 500 toys. Except for his grandchildren, however, Sita seldom gets to see the reaction of those who receive them. He has a favorite story, though; when he tells it, his eyes light up.

He has a friend, a teacher in New Jersey who spends his summers in Florida. This teacher took one of Sita's toys, a wooden puppy on a string, up North to a classroom of special needs children. He sat it next to an autistic child and then got distracted.

"The next think they heard is click, click, click. And the child -- who they could get interested in nothing, who just sat there -- is pulling the toy, saying, "Pull the doggy! Pull the doggy!' " Sita says with a wide-eyed grin. "They couldn't believe it. They called his mother, said, "You got to come over here.' And she did, and tears just came out of her eyes. She was just so, so amazed."

Sita smiles, sighs. This is his joy.

For years, he worked hard, first in the Navy, then as a welder and then as part-owner of a pizza joint. Now in retirement, he can finally express the creativity that he never had the time to do as an adult, or the money to pursue as a child. And people are helped in the process.

It is all very simple, he says with a shrug.

"I'm not alone. There are a lot of people who do what I do," he says. "I just want to make sure the kids have what I didn't have."

And so each morning he rises again, eats breakfast and does his exercises before padding over to the workshop in his garage. On goes the radio, and the squirrels outside scatter at the whine of the saw.

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