Cootie vs. Operation. Which was your favorite?

Napa Toy Museum

Napa, California

Charles Hall really knows his vintage toys. He curates an airy gallery of 19th and 20th century kid distractors. He and his wife Maggie opened the Napa Toy Museum in early 2024, in a downtown storefront space among bistros, bicycle shops, skateboard parks, and tourist parking lots.

Charles Hall tells visitors about the era of 3D models for US patent applications.

We've been to many toy museums across America. Some of Hall's collection is familiar, some is unique. The 19th century toys are contraptions made of painted cast iron and wood (or papier-mache) while mid-20th century Boomer-era treasures skew towards garish plastic pop items. The museum is really a collection of collections, organized and labeled, mostly from the personal collection Hall has amassed since 2000. When he's in docent mode he's likely to open a few glass cabinets and demonstrate his coin operated and mechanical novelties.

Toys collections are partly a story about their origins and use in society, and then a later era when they became objects of fascination, acquired and preserved by adults. Hall points out his display of penny toys, mostly hand-crafted in 19th century by Germany's uber toy makers and their families (some of the same immigrated to the U.S. with their verdammt piggy banks).

Vintage toys depict a vintage view of the Orient.

Harmless potato pellet Spud Gun.

Hall particularly enjoys the antique banks -- where children were encouraged to save up so they could buy candy or more toys. The Punch and Judy Bank dates from 1884. In a 1901 Magician's Bank, a coin vanishes as the illusionist lowers his top hat. Some of the painted toys are chipped, suggesting active careers in accruing coinage.

Uncle Sam was a popular figure, depicted in the toy bank world as a tax collector (1886). "This is exactly how the tax system works today. Your money's gone, and he's laughing," Charles cracks. Similarly, the British Bulldog Bank snatches a coin from the hands of a tiny man in a suit.

Noah's Ark From Germany

Hall's most elaborate toy is a Noah's Ark -- one of the few toys permitted for pious play on the Sabbath. His 1890 German ark was originally purchased in London. The ark is accessorized with 120 pairs of wooden carved/glued/painted animals and birds.

Some of the animals are "made up," Charles notes. "It's got four legs and a head -- that's an animal." The procession of pairs climb a switchback ramp up to the ark, under threatening cotton puffball clouds spewing cardboard lightning bolts. Arks were laboriously produced between 1840 and 1900, so some survive and are a collectible that continues to fascinate.

Working Patent Models

Carved animal procession to Noah's Ark.

Though they're not toys, the same scaled-down craftsmanship is evident in a display of working patent models from the late 19th century. "This is a washboard from 1872," Hall said. "Washing machines were the most patented item. The patent office had 20,000, 25,000. A patent clerk's job was to compare them with the other models and see if there was an innovation, a change." The requirement for 3D models ended, and in 1920 the government sold about 100,000 of them. "[Resellers] paid about 3 cents apiece for them. They sold 'em out on the street."

Girl's Toys

Sewing machine for the little ladies.

Half of the museum features slightly more contemporary toys -- if you consider the mid-20th century recent. Charles anticipates what might push sensitivity buttons and pull the potato gun triggers of his wine country visitors. He tries to provide cultural context, but vintage toys are so imbued with racist, religious, and sexist tropes that it's hard to know where to begin. If it's your first visit to an antique toy museum, keep in mind that no one sells this kind of stuff to modern families.

1950s Cragstan Crapshooter and Jolly Drumming Elephant.

One sign reads: "The boys got spaceships, trucks, guns, and the like. Girls got stoves, irons, and sewing machines to prepare them for their assigned roles as wives and homemakers." There are a lot of those homemaker items -- small, working sewing machines made for little girls to sew a chain stitch. "The Singer machines met the same high standards" as the machines sold to adults, the sign advises.

Animatronic cocktail man.

There are plenty of toys that might almost be gender agnostic. Cootie involves assembling a bug with different brightly colored parts. "An exciting educational game for all ages." We recall having sisters that had cooties, but brothers could just as easily be infected.

The classic surgical game Operation is where suburban kids first learned how careers in medicine might be fun (elsewhere in the museum is an Operation update featuring Homer Simpson). Other toys defy explanation or apparent purpose. Trixie the Magic Dog, a fuzzy pooch in a tuxedo, lifts a top hat from a table to reveal a tiny chicken.

A garish collection of Barbies and vintage 1960s dream houses turns out to be a generous temporary loan from another collector. "He's more interested in the fashion than the dolls," Hall said. Look for the original Ken dolls with glued-on hair.

While Charles Hall tinkered with the mechanism of a drinking man (more of a basement bar novelty), he lamented the fate of other collections. "Bank collecting mania reached its height in the 1960s and '70s. Today those collectors are old. They ask their kids: 'What do you want to do with the collection?' They say 'Get rid of it dad, I don't want to have anything to do with this.'"

Fortunately, this collection is here for the public to enjoy. Wait, there goes the mechanical cocktail man, filling his martini glass. Down the hatch!