Two years ago, Robert Greenberg was in his car making a beeline to Buckhead to visit his grandkids, when he heard a radio ad for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Scottish Rite hospital.
It was immediately followed by a news story about a giant recall of toxic toys from China.
Right then, Greenberg, a retired real estate developer and current woodworker, decided to become a toy maker for the kids at Scottish Rite.
His medium is wood, his palette cherry, pine and maple. His tools are lathes, sandpaper and oil, which he spends hours using in his home workshop.
Over the years, most of Greenberg’s work has been for adult use: turned wood vases, bowls, cups. But, once his kids started having kids, Greenberg started making wooden toys for them. The kind of playthings that don’t run on batteries or plug in, but that are powered solely by a kid’s imagination.
“You know, there’s a downside to all video games now,” Greenberg said. “They don’t encourage creativity.”
Greenberg contacted Scottish Rite to make sure his toys would meet the hospital’s donation guidelines, then he went to work. He enlisted the help of fellow members of the Atlanta Woodturners Guild. And, pretty soon, the group had made a few dozen finely crafted trucks, planes and trains from nontoxic maple.
Last year, the group donated a few dozen of the toys.
To say they were hits would be an understatement, Greenberg said.
Laura Smith, the hospital volunteer services coordinator who distributed the toys, agrees. Kids wouldn’t put them down. They painted them. They drew on them. They turned them upside down and rolled them all around.
This year, just in time for the winter holidays, Greenberg and his guild buddies returned to the hospital with more than 200 of the same sorts of handmade, nontoxic toys appropriate for kids with compromised immune systems.
Fellow woodworker Harvey Meyer made a bunch of whistles that even he said will probably drive the nurses crazy. (“They have my sympathies,” Meyer said.)
Greenberg expects that, next year, he and his buddies will do this again, and for years to come, as long as the hospital and the law allow it.
Ironically, after the toxic Chinese toy scare, which lit a fire under Greenberg, Congress enacted the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act last year. It requires all toy makers to test their products to make sure they are not toxic.
The law doesn’t take effect until early next year, but the tests are expensive. Small toy makers are lobbying their congressional leaders for an exemption to be written into the law just for them and the wooden planes and elephants they make.
Of course, the act is well meaning, Greenberg said, but come on.
“We know exactly where our wood comes from for the toys we make,” he said.
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