It's startling to me to realize how many Christmas presents from childhood I still remember. I'm speaking of the big ones, that Santa brought, that were waiting unwrapped under the tree on Christmas morning. They are memorable for many reasons, connected partly to the supernatural nature of their appearance but also partly to the fact that they were the most desirable objects one could imagine at any given age. They would have been amazing no matter how they got under that tree.
When I was six and seven I lived in a tiny town in North Carolina called Belhaven, the center of an agricultural region. The feed store was the biggest establishment in town, but there was also a small movie theater and a barbershop, which doubled as a variety store, offering miscellaneous goods like candy and toys.
That's a picture of the building it was in, above, now a beauty parlor. I photographed it on a visit I made to Belhaven last summer.
In the Fall of 1956 or 1957, when I was either six or seven, I was walking home from school one day when I saw something astonishing in the front window of the barbershop. It was a Roy Rogers Fix-It Chuck Wagon set, by Ideal. I had never seen anything quite like it, in the intricacy of its parts and accessories. I was already obsessed with toy soldiers, and sometimes these came with forts and artillery pieces, but the Roy Rogers Chuck Wagon was executed on a bigger scale than most toy soldier sets and was more rigorously focussed. Here was a chuck wagon with utensils and a trunk to store them in, horses with driving reins and a whip . . . and here were Roy and Dale and Pat Brady and Bullet, Roy's dog, and Pat's Jeep Nellybelle -- all familiar from Roy's show on television.
I really couldn't believe my eyes. I felt as though someone had entered my psyche and created the toy I'd most like to play with -- if only I could have imagined it in advance.
I ran home and told my parents that I had beheld the present I would ask Santa for at Christmas. I think I had some subconscious notion that Santa might have to act quickly to secure this treasure before it was bought out from under him from the barbershop/variety store. I'm not sure I understood that the chuck wagon set was not a unique example of the toy.
Of course it duly appeared under the tree that year and I can still remember carrying it into the dining room to unpack it from its box and marvel at its various parts. It was pure magic.
The set lost its component pieces over the years, until finally none of them remained. I still have a few toys from that era but the chuck wagon got played to pieces. The aura of it, though, has never left my consciousness, and a few years ago I began to wonder if I might find another set to replace it -- as a kind of link to my first and second grade self. Those were the years when movies became consciously important to me as magical creations and central to my imaginative life, and I always go back to them when I need inspiration.
A couple of years ago I found a Roy Rogers Chuck Wagon set in good condition on eBay and bid for it and won it, and a few days later it arrived at my home here in Las Vegas. When I unpacked it and set it up on my dining room table I didn't feel especially excited or particularly sentimental or even remotely nostalgic for times gone by. Those years in the middle Fifties have not gone by -- have not slipped into the past. I took up my imaginative conversation with the Roy Rogers Chuck Wagon set as one takes up a conversation with an old friend one hasn't seen in many years -- as though no time at all has intervened.
This tiny little plastic wagon is one of the vehicles that got me from there to here and it takes me back there any time I ask it to. Its horses can pull the weight of dreams.
