Palmetto man is spreading smiles to children everywhere, one toy at a time

Palmetto resident Bill Newby has a gift.

It’s not that the 88-year-old can look at a picture of a piece of furniture and build an exact replica. It’s not even the thousands of toy cars, trucks and tractors he painstakingly crafts each year to give away to children like a modern day Santa Claus.

The real gift is the smiles that his skills create.

It’s a measure of love that is not only felt locally, but across the globe. It’s a gift that spans miles, oceans and cultures. For Newby, it’s a hobby of sorts and he may never know just how much it has affected the children he’ll never see.

Maybe it’s a child in Cambodia who receives a race car from the agencies he donates to, and it could possibly be the only toy the child will ever own. Or maybe it’s a child in Palmetto with his mom at the grocery store who never imagined that he would be leaving with a custom built toy race car.

It’s those small but impact moments in life that a lot of people remember the most. That boy may grow to be a man and in the midst of a hard day remember this kindly older man who made his day many years ago. Maybe that man takes that memory and pays it forward.

“God works in mysterious ways,” is the mantra of Christians and perhaps many of the children Newby has come across was a moment in time when God knew that child needed a smile.

It’s a matter of faith, he said.

How it all started

Newby is a man of faith. He met his wife at his parents’ church after he left the Army and he would call Helen Newby his bride for 62 years. They would have as many children together as the decades they were married.

Helen died last year while a resident of Westminster Retirement Communities. Her doctor had recommended she go to a retirement home due to poor mobility. If you believe as Newby does that God really does work in mysterious ways, it was that move that gave birth to the idea of making toys for children.

Newby will tell you it started long before that.

“One of my dad’s last remarks to me was to keep my mouth shut and my ears open because I got one mouth and two ears,” he said. “That way you hear twice as much.”

Newby listened to conversations at the retirement community and what he heard were a lot of elderly people saying they didn’t have enough to do.

Newby approached staff and asked if he made toys for children could he have the residents at Westminster help him paint them.

For the next two years, including this past year after Helen’s death, Newby would keep visiting the residents and keep bringing them toys to paint. The coronavirus pandemic has temporarily halted that, but Newby is still building and painting away.

Last year, he built more than 3,000 toys and has more than 2,000 built so far in 2020.

While he makes trucks and tractors, it’s “more race cars,” Newby said. “That’s what the kids want. I believe if I was up north in a farming community they would want trucks and tractors, but down here, it’s pretty much race cars.”

How one man can impact the world

The bulk of the toys go to organizations like Samaritans Purse Shoebox Ministry and are delivered for Christmas presents. A lot of them are given to missionaries to give to children across the globe as part of ministry’s Operation Christmas Child.

“The truth is I have no idea how many places they go and how many children get to play with them,” Newby said.

But it’s the personal deliveries that mean that most.

Newby keeps plenty of toys in his vehicle and whenever or wherever he sees a child, a toy is provided.

When asked if he ever thinks about what a simple toy could mean to so many children who may have received one at a crucial point in their lives, Newby became emotional.

After a brief pause in the conversation, Newby said, “I think about how it affects them. The main reason I give them away is to watch a kid smile and be happy. It’s nice to see a kid out there playing with a toy.”

Newby’s craftsman skills go well beyond toys. He built most of the furniture in his house and constructs decorative wooden bowls, jewelry boxes and more. Each piece looks professionally made and he is self taught.

Those are gifts, as well, but the gift of giving is Newby’s greatest reward.

He received a poster board signed by dozens of children who received his toys at a neighborhood gathering and it’s no doubt one of his most prized possessions. He tries to imagine the thousands of smiles he crafted with each stroke of his paint brush or swipe of sandpaper, but he’ll never really know if it made a difference.

Every small detail in puts into his toy cars isn’t really a hobby or as he likes to say, “Something to keep me occupied.”

No, it’s a labor of love.

“I have the ability to do it so I do it,” Newby said. “I don’t know how many kids I’ve given toys to individually. I gave one to a boy just the other day at the store. He started playing with it on a palm tree that was laying at an angle. He yelled to his mommy, ‘Mommy, look at this!’ He was smiling and excited. There is no better picture than that.”

This story was originally published April 23, 2020 at 5:00 AM.