Mystery of a Wind Up Christmas Train That Lingered for 77 Years

Wind-up Toy Train 1923 /Screenshot.   ______________________________________________________________________________________________

By Pauline Masson – 

The late Carl Zitzman was 85 in the year 2000 when he told me a story of something that happened when he was a boy in downtown Pacific. He thought the event of his story took place in 1923 when he was eight years old, “But don’t hold me to that,” he said.

Carl’s dad August Zitzman was the town barber. His barbershop was at the corner of St. Louis and Second Street, where Brown Jerry’s now stands. The family home was in the now fenced yard behind Brown Jerry’s. As the youngest of six children, Carl spent his free time milling around the downtown area.

”We weren’t confined to the back yard,” he said. “You were pretty well trusted to go anywhere.”

Christmas at the Zitzman house was festive. Carl’s mother Katherine was musical and taught all six of her children to play the piano. But barbers were not wealthy, especially barbers with six children. With the exception of the piano, the family lived in modest circumstances. Like most other families of modest means, along with Christmas music, a bowl of Christmas candy and fruit, and a cache of homemade gifts, mysteriously showed up on Christmas morning.

But on that particular Christmas morning in 1923, there was a box for Carl that was noticeably different. It came from a store. There was no talk of it being brought down the chimney, It was just there. It was Carl’s. And it was definitely store-bought.

It was something you wouldn’t forget.

“I guess somebody thought more of me than I thought they did,” Carl said, feeling the need to explain it after all these years.

In the box was a small wind-up train engine, two or three attachable cars and some lengths of track.

“It had to have come from Mauthe’s Department Store,” Carl guessed. “That was the only place in town that actually had a line of Christmas toys.”

Carl set up the track on the kitchen table, attached the cars and wound the engine to make it circle the track again and again as his parents and his sister Irma, 13, and brother Gus 18 watched. It was a sweet Christmas morning, made all the sweeter by the realization that someone thought he was special.

However, to get the true picture of this moment  in the life of an eight-year-old boy, you have to remember that boys in downtown Pacific in 1923 knew everything there was to know about trains. Real trains.

Back then, life in downtown Pacific revolved around trains — big, noisy, smoke belching steam trains rumbled into downtown Pacific, as many as twenty a day, and came to a stop a hundred yards from Carl’s front door. As a boy he spent many free hours standing in the open doorway of the big Missouri Pacific train shop – in the present day commuter lot – and watch the men work on engines or other train parts.

Carl had the added advantage of being allowed to hang around in his Uncle Joe Ottman’s carpentry shop located across the street and survey the steam generator, pulleys and saws that men used to manipulate heavy objects so they could be shaped, cut or put together.

Even at eight, Carl knew how things worked. He was almost too old for the little wind-up train. But that mystery of his first store bought gift was a pretty good thing to hang onto through the years. Even at 85, he tilted his head and squinted in concentration, pondering who it could have been that bought the train for him. Certainly it was not his parents.

“We didn’t have a whole lot of money, especially for things like store bought toys,” Carl said. And, anyway, Gus and Katherine Zitzman would not have bought a gift for one of their three children still living at home, even if it was for the baby of the family. It had to have been someone else.

The likely suspect was Nellie LeSaulnier who lived in the two-story brick house next door, now the home of Ron and Charlene Sansone. To Carl, she was Aunt Nellie. She was the daughter of the town pharmacist, whose shop was next door to the LeSaulnier residence in the extant Iron Gate building.

Carl had no idea how old Nellie was that Christmas. He recalled that he thought she was old. She was a large lady who wore the long dresses of the day. But there was something about Aunt Nellie that made her extraordinary for the time. Aunt Nellie used tools. She knew how to fix things.

‘She had her own pliers and screwdriver that she carried in her apron pockets,” he recalled. “She could fix just about anything that could be fixed with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver.”

The Zitzman and LeSaulnier houses had adjoining back yards that were separated with a fence that had a gate in the center. Carl frequently wandered into the LeSaulnier back yard to see what Aunt Nellie happened to be fixing. He remembered that she occasionally engaged him to help her work on a gate hinge or something else that had come loose. One day when her radio quit working she asked Carl to come over and look at it.

“What she had was this AM Philco — it might have been an Emerson — that had four tubes and an IF transformer. The whole thing was held together with little screws,” Carl recalled. “She had taken that screwdriver and tightened down every one of the screws until nothing would work. That radio wouldn’t make a sound.”

“I’m not sure how I knew what to do,” he said. “That was before I started building my own radios. But one by one I loosened the screws and I was able to tune the radio to get it to work.

I’m pretty sure Aunt Nellie was the one who bought me the wind-up train,” he said.

The year that I wrote this story in 2000, the BNSF Santa Claus Express was returning to downtown Pacific. I told Carl I needed to write about the Christmas train and he told me the wind-up toy train story.

So here we are 25 years later, seemed like a hometown holiday memory worth sharing.

Merry Christmas!

Author: paulinemasson

Pauline Masson, editor/publisher. View all posts by paulinemasson