Bruce Mahler has been making and giving away toy trucks to the less fortunate for about three years — and he doesn’t plan to stop anytime soon.
Mahler, 82, operates his toy making “business” in the basement of his Middlefield home.
He has made over 400 trucks so far and gives them all away to “anything where there’s a reasonable cause.”
“I’ve been very active in churches all my life, so donating is a second skin,” Mahler said.
He said his toys have been used as donations for benefit auctions for a lot of causes, given away to churches or used for any unique situation a person might be in.
Mahler also will give them away to random people he thinks could use them. Some come to his home, where they can pick one out, or he will give people trucks from his car when out-and-about, he said, adding he refuses to accept any payment for the gifts.
The idea of giving toys away “just came to him,” Mahler said.
He receives 90 percent of his materials from a local Amish woodshop run by John Stutzman, who provides him with his wood cutoffs.
Mahler uses a variety of wood, from oak to Brazilian cherry to zebra wood, so the trucks are “very durable and it takes a really rough handling to damage them,” he said.
Mahler, originally from Cleveland, has been a Middlefield resident for over 12 years, having worked in a General Motors warehouse for 30 years.
He was about to flunk out of his high school woodworking class in school, when the truck idea hit him.
“I was terrible at it and something got into me to try making one, and I did, and that was the result,” Mahler said.
There are many people who surely are glad he did not stop then.
“I could tell you stories for an hour of how different things affect different people,” he said.
Once he gave away a set of toy blocks to a 3-year-old boy and that once in a car, the boy told his mother, “I’ll remember this day even after I’m dead.”
He has heard various stories from past recipients and has often received thank you cards afterwards.
He puts his name on the bottom of the trucks in case anything breaks, so people can bring it back and he will repair it.
Mahler said the best thing he gets out of making the toys is the “personal enjoyment… seeing the faces of either the parents or the children.”
“In some cases, when I’ve asked someone if they still have that truck … they say ‘No, the grandchild now has it,’” he said.
When asked if he plans on continuing, Mahler said, “Oh, yeah, until I can’t.”