These are plans for some folk toys.
By Henry B. Comstock. From the plans:
You'll love the old flipperdingers, whimmydiddles, and their
country cousins now being made in the Southern mountains.
Today, a group of North Carolina
mountain boys are busy carving a
niche with their jackknives in the
highly competitive toy industry. They all
work in their homes around Beech Creek,
a region just a whoop and a holler west
of Boone, N. C. Their products are faithful
copies of folk toys that have delighted
children of the Southern Appalachians
for two centuries or more.
Wonderful
gadgets are these, made of bits of laurel
and rhododendron, seasoned hickory, red
cedar, river cane, and acorn cups.
The idea of reviving interest in, and a
market for, these folk toys came from
Richard Chase, authority on the folk traditions
of the Appalachian South.
One day
Chase wondered if there wasn't still a
place for such old-time favorites as the
gee-haw whimmydiddle, flipperdinger,
fly killer, whizzer, and cornstalk fiddle.
Could they turn out these
toys in quantity, he asked, if he helped
with patterns and found the outlets?
Small initial orders, placed by gift
shops throughout the Asheville-Great
Smoky Mountains National Park area
were followed quickly by big ones. Visiting
youngsters from 50 states were going
for the toys like corn pone. So were their
fathers. Swinging a whizzer vigorously,
one red-faced tourist puffed: "They've
got the wrong name on this one. Back
where I come from, we used to call it a
bullroarer."
Chase knows better than to argue. A
thorough researcher, he's found that none
of these playthings are eculiar to the
Appalachian South. The whimmydiddle,
for example, has been reported from
Sweden and China. And a Czechoslovakian
book on early Central European toys
describes many such items.
