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It was a frosty morning at the East Salem Community Center Thursday where volunteers helped unload box after box of hand-crafted and hand-painted toy trucks.
Inside the building — which houses the Salem-Keizer School District’s Head Start preschool program — more volunteers unloaded the little trucks which were painted in a variety of different colors, and placed them gingerly on tables.
The nearly 700 toy trucks were lovingly assembled and decorated by a group of residents from the Capital Manor retirement community, and were then gifted to preschool children who are part of the local Head Start program. The children cycled into the room and got to select whichever truck they wanted.
“Pikachu!” one boy screamed as he lumbered toward a yellow painted truck.
A little girl clutched her new treasure, examined the truck and then told her chaperone that she wished the truck was a bit bigger so her teddy bear could ride in it.
“I have a truck in my backpack!” a boy yelled from across the room before getting back in line with his friends.
The children’s excitement over the wooden toy trucks was palpable and amusing to the volunteers present.
It takes a group of retirees the entire year to make the trucks for the kids, and the process leads up to one moment, Jim Tacchini, a Capitol Manor resident and the man coordinating the truck program said.
The West Salem retirement community maintains a wood shop where residents work crafting them. Their quota is about 900 trucks a year.
“This,” Tacchini said, laughing as a new group of preschoolers fanned out in search of their special trucks. “Of course we are retired, so it does provide us with an activity that we all enjoy doing. But the big reason is the little guys…we have one big day a year and this is it.”
The annual truck gift tradition dates back decades and is so established that nobody at Thursday’s event knew its exact history.
Tacchini said he’s been working on the trucks for eight years already and said the materials for the truck bodies and fenders are trim ends donated by local contractors.
The truck beds are fashioned from sanded down plywood.
Tacchini said he does a lot of sawing and sanding during the production phase, but his colleagues on the assembly line prefer that he not paint.
He is not the most skilled painter on the line, he said grinning.
George Hanby was at the community center Thursday as well. Hanby has been a part of the fun for about three years, he said. He typically works on building the truck beds which involves cutting them into pieces and putting them together.
“It takes about three or four hours to put about 20 of them together…I am just one of the worker bees,” Hanby said. “Another person has a team of painters, another one actually sands them. It’s quite an operation actually.”
Hanby said his youngest grandchild still had their truck from past years, and said adults buy trucks also to help support the program.
“This is the fun part now. When the children get the trucks, that’s the best part,” he said as he watched the chaos of excited children ensue. “Just that moment. It’s just worth everything.”
Contact reporter Joe Siess: [email protected] or 503-335-7790.
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Joe Siess is a reporter for Salem Reporter. Joe joined Salem Reporter in 2024 and primarily covers city and county government but loves surprises. Joe previously reported for the Redmond Spokesman, the Bulletin in Bend, Klamath Falls Herald and News and the Malheur Enterprise. He was born in Independence, MO, where the Oregon Trail officially starts, and grew up in the Kansas City area.
