Just like Santa's workshop
Tom Hasslinger | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 12 years, 11 months AGO
<p>Bill Haight makes about 300 wooden toys for the U.S. Marine Corps Toys for Tots program. Haight builds three models to date, an airplane, a helicopter and a dump truck, all with moving parts.</p>
<p>Bill Haight, who recently moved to Coeur d'Alene, talks about his woodworking experience and how he decided to make wooden toys as Christmas gifts for children in need Thursday in his home wood shop.</p>
COEUR d'ALENE - If Santa really had a workshop, inside a saw blade would screech.
The workshop would probably look something like the workshop behind the garage of 84-year-old Bill Haight's house in Coeur d'Alene Place, which looks like a regular workman's spot with tools, benches, wood and a saw blade.
Everyday, like clockwork, the blade there roars, working all year for one day, which is what Santa's workshop is supposed to do.
Thursday was no exception, and the cry of cutting filled the shop.
"That's what Santa's workshop sounds like," Linda, Bill's daughter, yelled above the whine, which she's used to having grown up with it always in the background.
Bill's wood crafting skill, which he developed in Syracuse, N.Y., hanging around his father's workshop, has turned from furniture to toys.
He doesn't make as many chairs, bookshelves and tables for friends and family as he used to - which were the years Linda grew used to the sound - but now makes trucks, planes and helicopters for underprivileged children.
"Now that I'm retired, I needed something to do," is how the retired United Airlines pilot put it.
But there's more to it than that.
When Bill saw the plane's design at a wood crafting fair several years ago, he wanted to copy it. So he did. Then he mastered it. All the while he knew he wasn't going to sell his yield. He knew too that kids, boys especially, love things that drive and fly.
So he gives them away each year at Christmas.
"I can only imagine they're happy when they get them," he said of the kids who receive them. "If it brightens up their day, it's the idea of it, it certainly brightens mine."
While he has been donating to toy drives for five years, he moved to Coeur d'Alene from New York six months ago to be closer to his two daughters.
By Wednesday, Bill had given more than 100 wooden planes, trucks and choppers to Toys for Tots and Children's Village - Coeur d'Alene's first fleet.
Each dump truck's back end lifts, the wheels roll, and the propellers on the flying vessels spin. Bill said he has never seen a child receive one, nor stumbled across one of the toys while he's out and about.
"I'd like to see the kids receive the toys sometime," he said. "I think that would be interesting to see their reaction."
Santa's workshop, it's not, he said.
"No elves," he said.
But Thursday morning, in the building behind the garage, Bill was already working for 2012.
This year's quota is filled, but Christmas comes once a year, every year.