Rediscover the treasures you wish you had at the Remember When Toy Museum
by Sara Schafer | sschafer@ruralmissouri.coop
The museum is a life-size game of “I Spy.” On one shelf you see rows of colorful train cars. Then you see the beautiful doll your best friend had when you were children. Next to it is a 3-D castle complete with Robin Hood and his Merry Men. With every step you take, you sink deeper into long-forgotten memories of your childhood.
Your guide through this trip back in time is Bob Wyatt, owner of the Remember When Toy Museum in Canton. For the past 40 years, the Lewis County REC member has been collecting, building and displaying around 300,000 toy treasures and perhaps the largest collection of Marx toys in the world.
Bob’s passion for toys started long before he opened the museum in 1987. “When I was a kid, every Christmas I would get a new toy,” he says. “One year it was a Western town, and the next year, I got Fort Comanche. Then I got a gas station, a farm set and a train set. Each year was a different toy.”
What young Bob didn’t realize was that most of these toys were made by Louis Marx and Co., which was an American toy manufacturer that produced everything from action figures to toy cars from 1919 to 1980. What the company was most known for was its sets of plastic figurines and little metal buildings.
“Marx had the idea that all the toys need to teach somebody something; many teach history lessons,” Bob says.
Bob and his late wife, Carol, loved collecting toys produced from the 1940s to 1960s, when toys were simple and often tied to imagination. At the museum, intricate scenes are on display, such as the Battle of the Alamo with figures and a miniature fort and farm scenes complete with animals and a barn.
Marx went out of business about the time Bob began collecting the coveted toy sets. Through his connections, he managed to buy copyrights, prototypes, salesmen’s samples, molds and more. Several of the toys were donated by former employees and Marx family members. As such, Bob has become an expert on this brand of toys.
“A salesman told me they only produced one toy at a time — they never mass produced,” Bob says. “They would take that one toy and show it to all their buyers across the country and take orders. Once they had orders, they would produce the toys. If they didn’t get orders, the toy would just end up being a prototype.”
Many of those prototypes are now in Bob’s possession and on display at the museum. He even recreates, reproduces and repairs toys, which he’ll sell to collectors (if he already has one in the museum).
Bob was originally a librarian. He retired from that and built a replica 1800s one-room schoolhouse, Cedar Falls School. He and Carol taught a handful of local students for around 20 years. The schoolhouse is just one of several historic buildings that surround the toy museum. Bob essentially recreated an 1860s town, complete with a blacksmith shop, post office, malt shop and general store.
As if the village and museum were not enough, the yard also features a collection of vintage cars from the 1950s and 1960s. “Unbelievable as it sounds, almost all of them are still drivable, even if they don’t look that way,” Bob says.
Whether it’s a new display piece for the village or a long-lost toy set, Bob is always on the hunt for his next treasure. He looks all over the country and attends flea markets and estate sales, hoping to find a little bit of history to preserve. “I’ll buy whatever strikes my attention; sometimes I find things that I’m not even looking for,” he says.
The Remember When Toy Museum is located at 19481 Highway B in Canton. To schedule a tour of the museum, call Bob at 573-406-2505.