News By, For, and About Aircraft Mechanics

November 25, 2007

Former Airplane Mechanic Opens Animated Toy Museum

You could call him the Gepetto of Meyersdale.

Gary Baer might not have built the dolls that grace his museum in that Somerset County town, but he has breathed new life into them.

"They're like my kids," Baer, 68, says of the animated dolls he saved from the brink of destruction. "Every time I see them, it still amazes me."

Baer hopes visitors to The Storybook Castle, his museum of animated department store Christmas windows, will feel the same magic he does every time he walks through the displays.

"To me, it's American art," Baer says. "You don't make this kind of stuff unless your heart and soul is in it, and so many people miss that when they look at art."

Baer has put his heart and soul and savings into opening The Storybook Castle and bringing visitors to his native Meyersdale.

The museum includes six full Christmas window displays from New York's Saks Fifth Avenue and a partial display from Lord & Taylor.

But, as most stories go, Baer didn't start off planning a museum of department store windows.

A lifelong toy aficionado, he actually was looking for life-sized toy soldiers to place at the entrance to a toy store he planned to build.

While visiting a warehouse in Virginia, Baer came upon a "Sleeping Beauty" window display.

"When I saw it, it just took my breath away," Baer says.

He soon discovered the company that owned "Sleeping Beauty" had six complete window displays for sale.

"I don't know how I'm going to pay you for them," Baer recalls telling a company official. "I don't know what I'm going to do with them, but I'll buy them."

All Baer knew was the displays were coming home to Meyersdale -- the town where he was born and raised but left in 1959 to make a life for himself as an airplane mechanic in Chicago.

"I really didn't want to leave, but there was no reason to stay," he says.

Baer and his wife, Elsie, 68, also a Meyersdale native, returned to their hometown in 1992 after he retired.

And when he bought the window displays in 2005, Baer saw them as a way to bring people to Meyersdale.

Sheryll Bellman, who literally wrote the book on New York department store Christmas windows, says she might be visiting soon.

Bellman, author of "Through the Shopping Glass: A Century of Christmas Windows in New York City," says she never had heard of a museum like The Storybook Castle. She's working on going soon for a book signing.

"It is a noble concept for that museum to showcase the windows and, hopefully, they will continue to save other store windows, as well," Bellman says.

The windows at The Storybook Castle all come from the 1990s and early 2000s.

Curator Mae Smith says Christmas windows are created to last only six weeks. Afterward, they are dismantled, and parts are sold to collectors. The rest are destroyed.

Last year, four or five tractor-trailer loads arrived in Meyersdale with the displays in boxes.

"Every time we opened a box it was like Christmas. It was like a big jigsaw puzzle putting them together," Smith says. "We're not sure. This is our interpretation, but it's awful close."

Visitors to the museum get to see the ornately dressed moving dolls as they experience one adventure after another.

Patrons walk down hallways to observe the six panels in each of the six themed window displays.

Walls are painted to look like blocks from castle walls. Stained-glass windows feature scenes from each of the window displays.

The displays are the originals from the stores, although a few pieces had to be repaired and restored.

None are behind glass.

"I want the children and the people to feel like they're theirs, and if you put it behind glass, they feel it's ours but you can look at it," Baer says.

Some of the windows tell classic tales such as "The Nutcracker" and "Sleeping Beauty." Visitors are greeted at the entrance to a partial scene from a "Peter Pan" window originally shown at Lord & Taylor.

Workers had to cut the pirate ship in half to fit it through the front doors and then reassemble it.

One window, "The Magic Telescope," takes visitors around the world from a Russian ballet to India, where servants fan a maharaja while a snake charmer woos a cobra from a basket.

Another window follows a little boy's dream meeting with the Sandman. Still another depicts a classroom making music with whatever they can find.

And in "One Enchanted Christmas," a curly-haired redhead named Isa gives Santa Claus her red velvet coat when he ruins his.

"If she were alive, I'd adopt her," Baer, a great-grandfather, says of the Isa doll.

His face lights up when he talks about the dolls.

"The personalities are really in the faces of the dolls," he says.

Words don't do them justice.

"It's so hard to describe," Smith says. "You can say, 'It's the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue,' but you don't get it unless you've seen it , and a lot of the young kids, they don't even know what you're talking about."

Julie Donovan, spokeswoman for the Laurel Highlands Visitors Bureau, has visited The Storybook Castle. She says the museum adds to an ongoing renaissance in Meyersdale, which is the first town in the Laurel Highlands along the Great Allegheny Passage trail.

"I think that many of us, from the time we were children, our parents took us to Pittsburgh to see the old Christmas windows," Donovan says. "I think it's really neat that here in the Laurel Highlands, there's somewhere close by that families can take their children to see these magical windows."

The joy is infectious.

Employee Darlene Marteney greets customers some days at the counter of the castle's gift shop. She loves her part-time job.

"How can you not?" she says. "You have pirates. You have princesses. You have toys."

Baer hopes people will come.

His house is mortgaged to the hilt. His wife works a second job to pay the bills. It will take years before The Storybook Castle makes money.

But for now, Baer is just happy he can bring joy to people. And he's glad he gave the dolls new life.

"They're so glad we saved these," he says. "Saving stuff is not on a lot of people's agendas."

Source