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25 years at The Toy
Factory. Just use your "back" button if history and nostalgia is not your forte! |
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The original Toy Factory on coastal highway 101
just north of Florence, Oregon. It's surrounded by forest service land and has a two mile
trail to the beach and lakes. We built most of the store, a house and a barn as well as
running The Toy Factory. Although we both were born and raised in Oregon this was quite a
change from the metropolitan Washington, DC area where we had been living and
working for more than a decade. In 1985 the highway department widened the highway and
left us with a much smaller parking lot and sort of in a hole. It was disturbing. We moved
to Corvallis and our present location soon after. The Florence facility now houses a
hand crafted wooden boat business and a specialty honey business. |
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This is "us" at a much younger age. The picture is
from a newspaper article about us in the mid 70's. Cute kid's! The toy testers are
all in their twenties now. The other two are a bit grayer. We went through an era of
"little picture taking" - hence the clippings that are really hard
to scan. |
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This really is the beginning of The Toy Factory.
We started in Alexandria, VA building toys in a small shop behind our house and selling
them by mail. The catalogs were often mimeographed! From mimeographing to web pages in
twenty five years. That's a lot of change. We built our first computer for the store in
the seventies. A Vector Graphics that we eventually upgraded to 16 Kilo - not mega- bytes
of memory and a random access cassette storage device that would store an un-heard
of at that time megabyte of data. |
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A couple digital of photos of The Toy Factory
at its old location. |
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DaVinci Days in Corvallis , Oregon is a
celebration of the arts and sciences. The Toy Factory often participates by providing
hands-on science stations and play areas in the Children's Village area:
microscopes for viewing compost, wooden trains for building systems, electrical circuit
making, puzzles. |
| Sometimes we play a bit at The Toy Factory. Pictured here is
our "Zotzthing", a Kinetic Sculpture. It's got six wheel drive, will float, and
can go through thick gooey mud, sand and just plain roads. This race is at Port Townsend
after just finishing a mile of paddling in Puget Sound. Other races, and you really
have to see the diversity of creations to believe, are in Arcada, CA; Boulder, CO; and
here in Corvallis, OR during our summer daVinci Day's Festival. Below are a couple of
shots where we were getting the "thing" ready. |
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copyright The Toy Factory 1998
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