By ERIC C. RODENBERG
Antique Week Associate Editor

JACKSON, Miss. — At 70 years old, Billy Neville calls himself the “Obsessive Archivist.”

Scraps of paper, envelopes filled with old photos, yellowed newspaper clips and more surround his desk, dominated by an old manual typewriter. As a local historian, raconteur, long-time retailer, advertising agent … and collector, Neville is nearly unparalleled.

 “There was once a day when Americans trusted their government, they pulled together, they made things – and those things were made with pride,” he says. “I think we yearn for a lot of those things we have lost … to feel, smell, taste and sense these things … they say you can never go home again; but, don’t you ever believe it.”

Neville speaks from experience. One of his favorite stories (and he has many) revolves around his youth, and reverberates through the history of his family.
“I love telling this,” Neville starts out as a preamble. “My dad, also William (Bill) Neville Jr. was a banker, insurance man and promoted a lot of community activities in town. He was a great guy, who was always tinkering with one thing or another.

“In the back of his business he had a woodworking shop. And, this was during World War II when there was a shortage of everything. There was next to no sugar, gasoline, clothing or toys … everything went for the war effort.
“So dad started cutting out toys – he’d cut an elephant and, I was a little tyke, maybe three or four, and I’d call it ‘BoBo.’ And then a bear, a rabbit and a pony, and I named all of those, and he would put the name on them. Dad had a great imagination, and we used to make up names and stories about each one of the toys.”

The pull-toys, made from scrap plywood around the McComb, Miss., area, began as a modest effort of friends and family. Then shortly, things began to “ratchet up” with orders coming in from regional department stores – a store in Jackson, then one in New Orleans.

Pretty soon, these matched pieces of plywood, secured with dowel rods began catching on elsewhere. The enterprise soon employed about 400 workers, working 24 hours seven days a week.

“Most of the men were off fighting,” Neville recalls. “We didn’t have any defense work in little old McComb, so, it was just women and kids, earning a little bit of badly needed extra money.”

Within a short time, Neville’s dad was selling the toys to the famed F.A.O. Schwarz in New York and Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago. The small little Neville manufacturing facility, marking its toys with Billy’s names BoBo, JoJo and more, put out a line of animals between 1940 and 1948.
They also manufactured a child’s wooden wheelbarrow, with painted plywood vegetables applied on the sides.

“You know back then everyone had Victory Gardens,” Neville says. “So we got the idea for the wheelbarrow, they’d cut those at the factory bring them back to our house where we all would paint them. Then, they would put them on big trays throughout our house where the paint would dry overnight. I’d have to get through the trays to get to my bed … many nights I spent sleeping right with the vegetables.”

Although the toys were popular, the business was unprofitable – especially after the arrival of wartime price controls. The stringent controls, initiated to curtail inflation, resulted in the toys being sold for less than what they cost to produce.

“Dad just kept the factory going,” Neville said. “He wanted to help the people in the area make some money, and he wanted kids to have toys.”
But, finally in 1948 the doors were closed on the toy manufacturing company, and Neville’s father went back to the bank.

“I recall asking my dad over the years about the toys and yet we never really discussed in any depth or detail,” Neville says. “He regarded it as a failure, a concept with which my dad simply couldn’t deal with … he just tried to put it out of his mind.”

But, the younger Neville always kept an eye out for one of the toys. He had no idea how many had been made, and had never seen one on the secondary market. “But I knew there had to be some around somewhere,” he said.
In 1990, while on a business trip to New York, “out of the corner of my eye” he spotted a small toy elephant in the window of a Lower Manhattan antique store.

Sure enough, it was one of the Neville toys created nearly 50 years before.
“I look it home and put it on top of the TV, and when dad came over for lunch that day, he spotted it right away … he was in his 60s then. He said, ‘where did you get that?’ With a tear in his eye and lump in his throat, he just opened up about those days … it was a joy to see.”

After that, Neville jumped another plane to New York, took a taxi to the antique shop he had bought the elephant from, only to find the store vacated. But, not to be deterred Neville located a woman who had purchased 50 of the toys from a burned out New York warehouse.

Billy bought them all, fixed up a display for his dad’s 70th birthday, with the inscription: “They’ve come home, Dad.”

Every example of any toy created within the Neville toy factory had been recovered, with the exception of the wooden toy wheelbarrow.
Neville advertised in AntiqueWeek for the wheelbarrow.

For weeks, Neville received no response. Just when he was about to give up he received a call from a Nebraska woman who saw the advertisement. She had the wheelbarrow, but was reluctant to part with it. She had bought it for her son, who was later killed in Korea.

Billy said he understood.

But a few weeks later, he received a rather largish package.

Inside was the wheelbarrow with a card that said: “This toy belongs to you. It needs to come home now.”

So now, with many of the toys home Billy Neville often loans the toys out to museums, such as the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson. He likes to share the toys, the stories and the history with a newer generation.

And today, the Neville grandchildren now play – and admire – the work of their great-grandfather. And Neville revels over watching the kids enjoying the toys just as much as their grandfather did in his youth.

The power of such nostalgia never dies, at least not for Billy Neville, his friends and family.