The young farm kid from Meaford stared at the shiny pedal car in the Owen Sound store, imagining climbing in and taking the wheel. “I thought, ‘Those rotten town kids,'” says Carl Jolley today. “‘Riding their own car down the sidewalk.’ I’d give my right arm for that.

Sixty years and more later, while he’s too big to ride most of them, Carl has his share of pedal cars and bikes and wagons and even rocket cars. A few years after retiring from a career as product engineer with General Motors in Oshawa, Carl opened Jolley Riding Toy Museum in his Meaford home to showcase the growing collection of unique vehicles he’d started collecting in 1987. Today the museum features some 400 pieces – and that’s after Carl recently sold off three truck loads to make more room.

Manufacturers have long put out kid-size versions of what was on the road. Back before the 1940s and 1950s pedal cars that captured Carl’s imagination, there were horse drawn farm wagons, delivery wagons, sulkies and hand-cranked Ford runabouts.

“I’m amazed by the mechanics of them and the beauty of them,” says Carl of his passion for riding toys. “It’s amazing to see what kids had a hundred years ago.”

Toys and engineering fit together in Carl’s life. When he was still in Grade 5, he began designing and making wooden lawn ornaments. To get them to town, he built a trailer for his bike and hauled them door to door, for sale at $1.50. “I’d come back home with five or six bucks, and I had the world by the tail,” says Carl.

Carl Jolley with the steam shovel toy he made at 12

At 12, he made a working steam shovel and tractor trailer out of wood and metal. “I wanted to copy the steam shovel that was up at the gravel pit,” he says. “They had these metal ones in the stores, but I knew there was no use asking for one of them, so I built my own. Mom gave me a sheet of wallpaper, and I got it upside down on the kitchen floor in the wintertime with a yardstick to draw up my plans.” The design challenges obsessed him. “I’m supposed to be listening to the teacher in the two-room school here, and I’m sketching the bucket and wondering how I can make that out of tin or wood so it tilts.”

That summer, he began selling bikes from the family barn. “Bikes were another way to make money,” he says. “Anything but farming.” The bike business thrived throughout Carl’s school years, but eventually he decided he needed to head to the city to make a living, and he sold his remaining stock to his teenage kid brother, Ralph. (Ralph went on to sell bikes for the next 40 years, and continues to run Jolley’s Farm Toys and Diecast with his wife, Joanne.)

Carl bought his first wagon in 1987 – well, his first several wagons. “Ralph got me down to Pennsylvania,” he says with a laugh. “We came home with seven wagons on the roof of his car. I was hooked.”

As the collection grew, he originally stored it in the barn next to Jolley’s Cycle Centre and Toys, and when Shane Jolley, Ralph’s son, moved the bike side of the operation to Owen Sound, Carl showcased some of his collection in the recently vacated space. Then, when Carl moved back to Meaford, he built a wing of his new home to house the museum.

Today, Carl can devote his time to restoring and rebuilding the finds that have lost paint and parts and other details during decades of play and rough storage. His workshop usually has a project on the go, and by dismantling and rebuilding the toys, Carl is in some way returning to those days of his youth when he spent school hours sketching designs. “I tell kids to challenge themselves,” he says. “Make things with your hands. There’s great joy in that.”

Kids and school groups are welcomed to the museum, which is open by appointment, and occasionally a delighted child gets to actually take one of the vehicles for a little spin.

A stroll through the extensive collection, including catalogue descriptions of many of the pieces, can take you back to your own childhood and much further.