THE KING OF TOYS

“ I like to have fun,” says Noel Barrett, his eyes dancing as he tries to decide whether to be Spaceship Santa—again—this year in Carversville’s town square. A short walk down the hill from Barrett’s home, the square is the spot where, for more than three decades, locals have grown accustomed to the spectacle of Barrett’s grand entrances as Father Christmas in a variety of conveyances, including a horse that almost bucked him off, a golf cart, a limousine, a motorcycle, and a boat. One year Barrett arrived via tandem bicycle with his adult son, Barker, in a matching Santa suit.

However, almost nothing topped the time he appeared in a giant gravel truck whose whirring lights flashed almost uncontrollably in the dark. “It looked like a spaceship landing,” he says. “It was just so fantastic.”

Besides his pseudo-extraterrestrial appearances, Barrett is well known beyond the boundaries of his quaint village, a close-knit community within Solebury where residents still pick up their mail at the local post office since there are no postal deliveries. To a legion of adoring fans around the country, he’s the toy specialist on television’s Antiques Roadshow, the bearded, mustachioed, and pony-tailed appraiser who blends knowledge with levity while informing guests about the value of treasures in their attics or hand-me-downs from long-lost relatives. Barrett has also made his mark in the world of high-powered auctioneers. Over four days of auctions near Philadelphia in November 2004 and May 2005, he brought in more than $5 million for a collection of toys and miniature trains owned by Ward Kimball, one of Walt Disney’s most noted animators.

But to the people of Carversville, he’s just Noel, known for his wacky, storefront home—with its 1950s-like diner/kitchen and 1,800-square-foot third-floor loft filled with toys and historic memorabilia—as well as his spirited involvement in local politics and fundraising. “To know Noel is to love Noel,” said Cindy Baum-Baicker, a longtime friend and member of Solebury Township’s Human Relations Commission. “They broke the mold when he was made,” she says.

Barrett has been firmly entrenched in the life of Carversville since he moved into a vacant storefront with his young family in 1983 and quickly opened an antiques store. He broke into the big time with his first appearance on Antiques Roadshow in 1997.

Barrett has served as a Solebury Township supervisor and as co-president of the Historic Carversville Society, for which he started a benefit road rally. At the annual Carversville Day, set this year for May 30, he has served as an auctioneer and as judge of the pet parade. “He’s charming and charismatic,” says Kathy Stein, a board member of the historical society. “He knows so many people, and he just tries to draw them out.”

In the mid-1990s, Barrett was part of a core group of activists who helped save Carversville’s post office when it was threatened with extinction. He took part in a lobbying campaign and, as a celebration of the campaign’s success, he designed a T-shirt imprinted with a stamp that read “Carversville First Class.” “We didn’t stop,” he says of the post office preservation effort. “It was a major achievement and a major victory.”

A film buff since childhood, Barrett introduced Films in the Field, where movies are shown on the side of the former general store in Carversville’s town square. Barrett’s goal was to educate people about black-and-white films of the 1930s and ’40s. He was especially interested in Hollywood icons who had ties to Bucks County, such as the playwrights Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, both of whom had homes nearby. Hart, who lived two miles up the road, loved to entertain and kept adding bedrooms for guests, including Harpo Marx, who relished a good game of croquet. In 1941 the actress Kitty Carlisle starred in the Hart-Kaufman hit comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner at the Bucks County Playhouse. Hart and Kaufman also performed in the play, along with Marx, who abandoned his famous onstage silence to utter some speaking lines. Five years later, Hart and Carlisle were married in New Hope and settled into Fairview Farm, Hart’s home on Aquetong Road.

Last September 6, Solebury Township proclaimed Barrett’s 85th birthday “Noel Barrett Day” to celebrate his “life, service, humor, and enduring contributions.” Board of Supervisors Chair Mark Baum Baicker presented the proclamation at a birthday party, complete with a deejay, at Barrett’s home, where guests danced on the third-floor loft, packed with a wide array of toys and historic memorabilia. “I mean, how many guys at 85 are doing a dance party for their birthday?” says Baum Baicker. Of Barrett, Nick Dawes of Antiques Road Show says: “He’s 85 going on 25.”

Anne Carney, Barrett’s wife since 1998, dubs him her “entertainment center.” A former psychiatric social worker and co-owner of the now defunct boutique Garbo & Sasha in Frenchtown, Carney has been known to joke, wistfully, that she wishes she had some wall space of her own in the overstuffed home.

As for the proclamation, Mark Baum Baicker says, “Noel just ate it up, he loved it. He’s such a great guy, and he needs to be recognized as much as we can for all that he’s done for people over the years.” At the 85th birthday party, Barrett’s many friends mingled with his many collections, which include optical and pre-cinema toys, lithography paper, comic book characters, advertising icons, and salesmen’s samples. Revelers could sit in a barber’s chair with a vibrant red seat, if they desired, or take the wheel of a yellow bumper car while gazing up at the tall guy in blue overalls, a fourteen-foot statue of Manny, a co-founder of Pep Boys, an auto supply chain originating in Philadelphia.

Presiding over the party were the oversized head of Groucho Marx and a life-size Betty Boop doll, while three-foot-tall puppets of former Presidents Harry Truman (in a Hawaiian shirt) and Franklin D. Roosevelt joined clusters of other puppets around the room. “I like stuff,” Barrett says.

He’s been collecting stuff since childhood. His three-story home is filled with countless books, paintings, CDs, toys, and so much more. And everything in it, he says, tells about four stories. He points to a colorful cast-iron map of the United States hanging on a wall. The map depicts not only geography, but also education, history, and commerce of the mid-1800s. Measuring about six feet wide by almost four feet high, the map features states, mountains, and rivers and was used as an educational tool so that schoolchildren could assemble the pieces on tables, like jigsaw puzzles.

According to Barrett, the map was displayed at the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. The map is also significant, Barrett says, because it was made of cast iron, an important construction medium in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that was also used in furniture. The map, he says, “is the ultimate piece of Americana cast iron, with the United States in perfect scale.”

“Noel is an extremely learned individual,” says Dawes, an appraiser and senior vice president of Heritage Auctions in Manhattan. “He doesn’t just know what this toy is and where they made it. He knows why they made it and who they made it for.” Dawes appeared with Barrett on the American debut of Antiques Roadshow thirty years ago and has traveled with him around the country ever since. In addition to Barrett’s serious side, Dawes says, “He has an extremely advanced sense of humor.… He’s very witty.”

Take Barrett’s irreverent addition to the wooden reproduction of the famous Washington Crossing the Delaware painting by Emmanuel Leutze. On a table in front of the carving—which is about the same size as the cast-iron map—Barrett has placed a small AI photo of himself, posing as George Washington in a tricorn hat. Barrett smiles at the camera, wearing his characteristic red glasses and sporting a pearl earring.

In his more professorial role, Barrett refers to the carving as a “patriotic religious” piece because the artist, Alphonse Morder, who moved to America from Italy in 1905, substituted Jesus for one of the rowers in the painting. Wearing humble clothes, the Jesus figure has wavy, dark hair that frames a somewhat sad face contemplating the water. “The level of detail is phenomenal,” says Barrett, surmising that the woodcarver may have honed his skills carving Stations of the Cross in churches before crossing the ocean. “He was obviously very religious,” Barrett says.

Asked about his favorite piece among the many toys, books, paintings, and historical pieces in his home, Barrett doesn’t hesitate: a sextet of buxom dancing girl puppets he calls “my Rockettes,” which went perfectly with a painting he already had of New York City’s Radio City Music Hall Rockettes. (He later discovered the troupe actually represents the Florodora Girls, who starred in the 1900 musical that ran a record 552 performances on Broadway.) “When I saw them, I had to have them,” Barrett says. “I only buy what I have to have.”

Barrett placed the dance troupe above the third-floor landing, where it is an eye-catching focal point at the entrance to the loft. “They fill the space over my stairwell,” he says, “like they were designed to be there.”

Where does Barrett find new items for his collection? The leads can come from anywhere. One day he was in the Stockton Market when a man tapped him on the shoulder and asked, “You’re Noel Barrett, right? The Roadshow.” The man was a dealer in vintage photography. Barrett visited his nearby studio and was about to leave emptyhanded when the man pulled out a heavy wooden box that immediately caught his interest.

“It was a salesman’s model of a diner interior. Could it be more up my alley?” he says. “I love diners. One of my favorite things is to watch a short-order cook in the kitchen.” Salesman’s samples were scale models used by traveling salesmen to demonstrate everything from aluminum awnings to furniture, windmills, even headstones. Barrett’s loft has a whole table of samples in closed wooden suitcases.

Opening the diner’s case, he reveals a two-foot scale model with tables and banquettes in different colors and textures, including chrome-edged Formica tables in reddish-pink, white, and ivory, with faux marble or linen-like surfaces, and vinyl booths in a variety of hues. “This is one of my favorite things and probably one of the most recent things I bought,” he says. “Total serendipity. That’s the magic of this whole business. You never know what’s around the corner.”

Long before Barrett acquired this sample, however, he had already installed the real thing in his home. “I’ve always wanted to live in a diner,” he says. So he created one on his second floor to mimic the diners of the 1950s, when Archie and Veronica of comic book fame hung out at a diner with their friends after school. Barrett’s diner repurposes several castoffs from local diners and has a commercial kitchen, a twelve-foot counter, neon lights, black-and-white floor tiles, a jukebox, and a telephone booth that doubles as a pantry. A vintage sign on the nearby red banquette adds another authentic touch: “BOOTH SERVICE: A MINIMUM CHARGE OF 10¢ PER PERSON IS REQUIRED.” Ten cents, in those days, Barrett quips, might buy a Coke.

Built of stone in 1830, Barrett’s home was once a department store—believed to be Bucks County’s first—with a wooden elevator to shuttle goods from floor to floor. Over the years, the structure also served as the town’s post office, a Goodyear tire center, a farm supply store, a tobacco blending company, and, in one of its more intriguing incarnations, the setting for boxing matches, most likely during the Great Depression. Around that time, the building was also used to raise turkeys, and Barrett still finds marks where some demonstrative birds pecked at windowsills.

He opened the antiques store a few months after moving in, calling it Rosebud Antiques, a tribute to Citizen Kane, his favorite film. In the movie, a dying newspaper mogul—purported to be William Randolph Hearst—uttered “Rosebud” on his deathbed, referring to a childhood sled that signified his lost innocence.

The antiques store was Barrett’s second of that name, the first being in his hometown of Alexandria, Virginia. “A lot of kids collect stuff,” he says. “A lot of them grow out of it, but I never did.”

He also loved history and the movies—black-and-white films from the 1920s to the 1950s, to be exact. Alexandria had four movie theaters within walking distance of his home, which helped to feed his addiction. As a child, Barrett met some big-screen stars of the day as the son of a naval officer who belonged to the Army Navy Country Club in Washington, D.C., which hosted annual celebrity golf tournaments in the late 1940s.

“I loved Milton Berle and I followed him around in my bathing suit while he was golfing,” Barrett says. “He quit on the sixth hole because it started raining, so I walked with him back to the clubhouse, his arm around my shoulder. I was barefoot on the gravel, but I would have walked on hot coals.” It was at that moment that the youngster decided he wanted to be a celebrity when he grew up, but he had no idea what kind or how he’d get there.

Things just seemed to fall into place, he says, perhaps due to one of his oft-invoked words: “serendipity.” After high school, he earned a degree in history from Columbia University, while also studying filmmaking at Columbia and City College of New York. Browsing through an antiques shop one day in Alexandria, where he moved after graduation to find a job, he stumbled upon one of his favorite childhood toys: the Li’l Abner Band, a wind-up tin toy from the mythical Dogpatch, featuring Li’l Abner, Daisy Mae, Ma with a baton, and Pappy on drums. Once at home, Barrett says, it looked so lonely on his shelf that he started collecting other toys. He eventually left his job editing film for the federal government before opening Rosebud antiques full-time, which up until then had been a weekend shop for his ever-expanding collections.

Barrett landed in Carversville because he found an antiques store there that he loved while visiting his first wife’s parents at their home in nearby Warrington. “She had my kind of stuff,” he recalls of the store’s owner. “Coca-Cola, advertising, old toys, and just my stuff.”

He had already outgrown his antiques store in Alexandria and was looking around for a new base. “I always loved this little town,” he says. When he realized his future home had a third-floor loft, he says, “That was the magic word, because going to school in New York City, all you wanted was a loft. And I said, ‘I’ve got to go look at this building,’ so I came here and that was it.

“I just feel like I stepped into it when I found Carversville. River Road is one of the most beautiful drives in the country. I think it’s probably one of the top ten. The whole area is just fabulous. I count myself very, very lucky to have found this building and lucky to have found Carversville.”

Barrett has been writing a book about his collection, with detailed photos, for the last decade or so. He hopes to publish it later this year. And as he mulls over his plans for the future, a reprisal of his role as Spaceship Santa at this year’s bonfire and communal Christmas caroling on the Carversville town square remains a possibility. “I would repeat it if I can arrange it,” he says. “It was spectacular.”

Tracy Ecclesine Ivie is the River Towns home and design editor. She fondly remembers being in the audience at a Howdy Doody show in New York as a child.