There's so much to see at Donn and Sarah Kreofsky's toy store that it takes some time for the eye to adjust to the surroundings. The glass display case just inside the door houses, among other things, a collection of nested dolls- Russia's czars, England's royal family, the cast of characters from the O.J. Simpson trial. Overhead, an electric train hums and chatters along a rail that runs near the ceiling. An odd wooden branch with an enticing knot hole reads; "tonk tons," the meaning of which becomes clear only after the visitor has put a finger into the hole, recoiled, then spelled the words out backward.

The handcrafted toys, miniature trains model planes, and displayed collections are a faithful catalog of Donn Kreofsky's personal obsessions-a physical counterpart to his roving, inventive, boisterous, and wistful noggin. He has devoted some two decades to building Lost Arts Revival by Kreofsky- LARK for short- a 24,000-square-foot toy box that stands a quarter-mile off the Mississippi River at the foot of Lake Pepin. In a season given over to plastic shopping- mall gizmos- as seen on TV-a trip to LARK is a return to the sturdy quality of Christmas past. No cartoon action figures, Game Boy cartridges, or the latest toy sensation in Kreofsky's store.

Instead, there are wooden toys Kreofsky designs himself- pull toys, blocks, and rocking horses. Crowded display cases crammed with Kreofsky's growing collection of antique and collectable toys. Shelves lined with old-fashioned toys for sale: tin wind-up toys (over 500 varieties), lead soldiers, tin tops, Jacob's ladders, hand puppets, puzzles, card games, pickup sticks, whoopee cushions, exploding pens, magic tricks, scale-model automobiles, enough nesting dolls to populate a small village, miniature sail boats, and rare, classic children's books. "I try to recreate my own toy collection," he says from his stool behind the cash register at Boomer Heaven (LARK's division of nostalgic toys of the '50s and '60s and one of six interconnected stores under one roof). "I used to have Fort Apache, and the Alamo. Davy Crockett things, like coonskin hats. Slinkies, board games, cards, and Chinese Checkers, and comic books: Bugs Bunny. Little Richie."

Kreofsky, 50, has a broad jaw and white beard, which, along with his ample girth and customary attire-a Hawaiian shirt- make him look like St. Nick on vacation. On the shelves behind him, ranks of toy soldiers stand at attention. To his right sits a raft of wind-up, miniature Tilt-A-Whirl rides. To his left are parked dozens of model sports cars. Children race from one toy to the next, eyes bulging. Old men stoop over the shelves and recognize youthful playthings. A few bars of polka music from an extraordinary carousel, drift down the hall. Kreofsky sits calmly enjoying his creation, clearly a man obsessed with joy and child's play. "Maybe," Kreofsky says, "I never grew up."

Donn Kreofsky was 3 years old when polio swept through his hometown of Plainview, Minnesota. He and his 7-year old brother were among the many children infected with the virus. The boys were quarantined and everything they had touched- toys, schoolbooks, desks, was burned to stop the spread of the contagion.

His brother died from the disease. Kreofsky's legs were paralyzed for most of his childhood. His earliest memories are of the iron lung that kept him alive. As he grew older, customary childhood amusements were off-limits. Instead of swimming or roughhousing, he was confined to bed.

He traces his fascination with toys, especially miniatures, to this time. His parents brought a handful of soldiers to him in the hospital, and he invented battles on the bedspread. "If you're bedridden," he says, "the only thing you can do is play with small things." He also began developing his skill as an artist, starting with paint-by-numbers kits, then painting and drawing free-hand. Throughout grade school he used a wheelchair and, later, crutches, to get around. "Whenever there was phy ed or something physical, I'd be drawing, " he says. In 1967, after high school, Kreofsky enrolled in the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD). Early in that first semester at MCAD he decided to become a nature photographer. He invested in close-up lenses that would allow him to shoot within inches of flowers and leaves. Then he traveled to his parents' Wabasha home to photograph the natural beauty of their surroundings. "It rains," he laughs, "just pours all week. There's nothing to do. I'm trying to figure out how to use these lenses. So I go down in the basement. Here's my old toy chest. I pull out hundreds of army men and set them up to see how the depth and focusing changes using these closeup lenses." When he developed these pictures, he liked the effect. "So I threw them in the photography case. When I got back to MCAD, instead of doing nature photography, I played around with toys."

Kreofsky graduated and entered the Master of Fine Arts program in studio art at the University of Minnesota. He built sur-realistic landscapes out paper dolls and miniatures and photographed them. He manufactured elaborate sets out of balsa wood, like a western town he peopled with hand-colored photos of cowboys and lawmen.

And then there was his Trojan Horse. It was 3 › feet tall, made of balsa, and pulled by hundreds of little handpainted horses. The Greeks were all fighting around it with catapults and horses. Took me 2,000 hours to build."

Kreofsky taught in the art department at Winona State University and St. Mary's College, also in Winona. He married Sarah, and they had three boys together. When his children were toddlers, Kreofsky built toys for them to pull around on strings: a kinetic turtle, a pink flamingo, a Noah's ark. "It evolved into making a few toys for sale," he explains.

He began attending craft fairs and was spotted by toy company sales representatives. Before long, Kreofsky was churning out wooden toys for 2,500 stores: the Smithsonian museum store, FAO Schwartz, Neiman Marcus, museum stores all over the country. But the Kreofskys decided that the small store they had opened was more fun than the wholesale business, so they concentrated on that. The store let them spend time with their customers, some of whom collect every wooden LARK toy made.

"It's all about people who love toys." Sarah Kreofsky says. "We meet them when they come into the store to look for the new toys, or a new Christmas village. It's like a big family." There's a certain romance to owning a LARK toy, she adds, because it never becomes dated. "It can live through generations."

Three years ago, they built their current store, which included a bakery, a bookstore, and birthday party facilities. "We enjoy coming here," Kreofsky says. "It's fun to wake up and be your own boss. Only when it's really terribly quiet do I sit back and wonder what I'm going to do next. That's what gets me into trouble."

At just such a time in 1989 he decided to build a carousel like no other in the world.

Kreofsky's carousel is a gleaming destination at the far end of the store. Children and adults come from miles around to ride this unorthodox work of art. Instead of carousel horses, a stable of hallucinatory creatures revolve: a flamingo, a swan, an otter, a wolf- all carved in intricate detail. Each creature took some four months and four craftspeople to complete. There are 19 animals on the finished ride- not counting the stegosaurus and the life-sized moose, which were built but proved too heavy for the carousel's machinery.

Kreofsky scheduled the grand opening in 1997 on his birthday. By the end of the next day, 16,000 passengers had taken a spin.

During the eight years it took to build the carousel, Kreofsky sometimes worried that he'd taken on too much. The cost of the project had grown to about $400,000 and the scale of it felt overwhelming to an artist who usually works in miniature, "The most personal things are small art objects that you can feel and touch. The carousel became a public piece. But that's something you always want to do in art school-be a great artist who would do public works that tens of thousands of people would see. That's what this turned into."

The carousel is now one of the main attractions at the store. Children awed by the unusual beasts stare in wonder and trepidation at the machine- until it begins to spin. They line up, eager to climb onto the swan or the otter and be transported into a fantasy, if only for a few minutes. "Their jaws drop, their eyes open up wide. They can't believe what they see," Sarah Kreofsky says.

But the children who climb aboard are outnumbered 2-to-1 by adults. "There are seniors actually wiping away tears," Sarah says, "because it ties into some memory they have."

Now that the carousel is up and running, Donn Kreofsky is already cooking up his next scheme- a mini-golf course, with his own whimsical artistic touches. "He came in and told us about it the other day," says Mary Eversman, who has been hand-staining toys at LARK for nine years. "That's the thing about Donn- he's always full of surprises."

When he's not busy running the cash register or cooking up new schemes for his business, Kreofsky buys old toys, at estate sales, garage sales, and auctions. "I never know what I want until I see it," he says. People often bring their old toys to him.

Some of the 16,000 toys he's collected fill a dozen or more display cases lining the hallways. In the birthday party room, five tall cases are jammed with hundreds of toy robots. One is a wind-up tin toy, a walking astronaut robot. Another has a microcassette player for a face. A funny little man named "Mr. Machine" is made of plastic gears and has a top-hat and plastic screw for a nose.

Across the hall from the robots stands a case that holds, among other things, a genuine erector set, "Jocko the Drinking Monkey" (a battery-operated toy that does just what the name promises), and a pair of metal divining rods packaged and sold as a "Little Prospector Uranium Detector" ("Locates buried treasure and all metal bearing ores!"Š "Glows in the Dark!"). Other cases hold antique and reproduction cars and trucks. One case is filled with board games.

Kreofsky has no written inventory. "When you collect over a period of several years you remember each piece," he says. Likewise, he keeps no price list. "I don't buy toys to resell," he explains.

Kreofsky knows that the contemporary shopping experience must offer more than, as he puts it, " a stool and a cash register." His toy collection makes his store into a museum that taps directly into the nostalgia of his customers. If a customer can't find a toy in the collection, Kreofsky will purchase one the next time he sees it.

With his racks and racks of toys, he's invented a lovely world in which to remain a child. When a customer brings in a old toy set that Kreofsky once owned, he still gets a charge out of it. He gets down on the floor and sets up all the army men in their proper places, remembering all the battles he waged in his youth and all the soldiers- both brave and cowardly. "They were my friends," he says.

These days, Kreofsky counts among his friends the thousands of kids and grownups who come through the store every week to find him amiably ringing up orders within earshot of his carousel, a latter-day Santa Claus in his toy factory. "People always say, 'I wish I had your job,'" he says. "I'm not ready to retire. I probably never will. I'll always find something to do with collecting, or building, or playing with toys."

Article by Joseph Hart - Photography by Steve Neidorf
Minnesota Monthly - December 1999