Very early picture of me sporting the engineer's hat that I wore a lot in those days!

As I mentioned yesterday, I do not intend to do this blog about The Toycrafter in any particular order, but this picture is a really early one!  I was obviously a lot younger in this picture - The file I have these pictures in is labeled 4-75 (Age 29)  This was taken at the third place that The Toycrafter was located.  Stone Quarry Road, Ithaca, NY.  To my knowledge I don't think any pictures exist of the first two locations, but at some point I  will elaborate on that?  This is me - standing in front of a pile of wood that we got from a guy who sold us scrap from The Overhead Door Company in Cortland, NY.  If you look carefully at the wood behind me, pretty much every piece is a completed part of an industrial overhead door, that had some flaw in it, and was thrown away - to be later resurrected as a wooden toy! Again, I will expand on  that later, but this is the first picture in a series that was taken of our process for making one of the toy cars we made early on.  While spinning tops became our main product over the later years, at this point in time, we made mostly toy cars, trains, trucks, etc.  Over the years I always say that we made pretty much any wooden toy you can think of!