Bradford, N.H.
By November, Liberty and his assistants — special needs children and adults from across the state — had made 1,300 wooden toys, each of which was given away.
“A lot of people are calling me Santa for doing what I’m doing,” Liberty, 85, said in a telephone interview from his winter home in Texas. “I’m trying to grow a beard, but it’s a little scraggly yet.”
Liberty’s venture into making toys began 31 years ago in Raleigh, N.C. He was working in a stressful, high-level job for IBM when a friend invited him to visit a woodworking association to unwind. Liberty had dabbled in woodworking before, making toys for his own children (he raised six) and furniture for his home. When he visited the association, Liberty learned that members made thousands of toys each year for Toys for Tots. He was captivated.
“I thought, ‘I’m going to get involved with that,’ ” he recalled.
He began by renting the organization a shop space, which later expanded into two 1,000-square-foot shops. Liberty himself began making toys, simple pine creations at first and later more sophisticated creations like the buses, planes and boats that he crafts today.
When Liberty moved to New Hampshire in 2005 he had a custom shop space built in Bradford so he could continue making wooden toys to donate. Initially he made only about 150 each year, but his operation grew quickly.
“Every year it has increased,” he said. This was his most productive year to date, driven in part by the fact that Liberty made extra toys to donate to refugee children living near Concord.
“Those kids have nothing,” he said. “So this year they got some toys.”
Liberty distributes his toys through community organizations across the state, including the Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth, the Claremont Soup Kitchen, and food pantries and homeless shelters. This year the Lake Sunapee Region VNA distributed 50 of Liberty’s creations as part of the Kearsarge Kids Christmas Program.
“Hal embodies the spirit of giving,” Cathy Raymond, development director at the VNA said by email. “His generosity and kindness seem limitless.”
Although Liberty’s spirit is the driving force behind the toy donations, he receives help from special needs children and adults who volunteer time to work cutting, sanding and assembling toys. Students from Parker Academy, a school for children and teens with developmental delays in Concord, volunteer at the workshop a few days each week. Liberty also works with developmentally delayed adults and people with mental illness who are living in transitional housing.
He said he has found that his volunteers get as much from the program as the children receiving the toys.
“I’m often the first one to take them and teach them, and appreciate what they were doing for me,” he said. This year, on the last day of the production season, the transitional housing program had to draw names to see which of the 15 program participants would volunteer that day, since there are only three openings at a time.
The wood for the toys is donated by Little Harbor Window Co. in Berwick, Maine.
“They’re just so generous every year,” Liberty said.
Liberty studies each piece of wood to decide how best to use it, carefully optimizing his materials.
“You have to look at it and say, ‘What can I see in this? What toy?’ ”
Despite the donated wood and volunteer labor, Liberty said he spends about $5,000 each year making the toys, in addition to the $100,000 he spent building the workshop. He gets a $4 tax write-off for each toy that he donates.
The cost, he says, is entirely worth it.
“These are lifetime toys,” he said. “These kids can give (the toys) to their kids one day.”
Liberty takes pride in making durable toys — something recipients have noticed. One area mother started crying when she was told she could select a wooden toy for her autistic son.
“This is the first toy her son couldn’t destroy within a day of Christmas,” Liberty said.
Making so many toys is a full-time job, with volunteers in the workshop five days each week. Liberty has considered retiring, but his wife reminded him that he can’t just step away.
“She said, ‘There’s no one replacing you. Who’s going to make toys for all these kids?’ ”
And so, sometime in April, the Bradford toy workshop will be back up and running again.