700 preschoolers in Salem receive handmade toy trucks from seniors

It was a frosty morning Thursday at the East Salem Community Center as volunteers helped unload box after box of handmade and hand-painted toy trucks.

Inside the building that houses the Salem-Keizer School District’s Head Start preschool program, other volunteers unloaded the small trucks painted in different colors and carefully placed them on tables.

The nearly 700 toy trucks were lovingly assembled and decorated by a group of residents at Capital Manor retirement community and then given away to preschoolers participating in the local Head Start program. The children cycled into the room and were able to choose the truck they wanted.

“Pikachu!” a boy shouted as he stumbled towards a yellow painted truck.

A little girl clutched her new treasure, examined the truck, and then told her companion that she wished the truck was a little bigger so her teddy bear could ride in it.

“I have a truck in my backpack!” a boy yelled from across the room before joining the line of his friends again.

The children’s excitement about the wooden toy trucks was palpable and amusing for the volunteers in attendance.

It takes a group of retirees all year to build the trucks for the children, and the process takes just a moment, said Jim Tacchini, a Capitol Manor resident and the man who coordinates the truck program.

The West Salem retirement community maintains a woodworking shop where residents make wood. Your quota is around 900 trucks per year.

“That,” Tacchini said, laughing as a new group of preschoolers filed out in search of their special trucks. “Obviously we’re retired, so it gives us an activity that we all enjoy. But the big reason is the little people…we have one big day of the year and this is it.”

The annual truck giveaway tradition goes back decades and is so established that no one at Thursday’s event knew its exact history.

Tacchini said he has been working on the trucks for eight years and said the materials for the trucks’ bodies and fenders were trim pieces donated by local contractors.

The truck beds are made of sanded 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’s not the most skilled painter on the track,” he said with a grin.

George Hanby was also at the community center on Thursday. Hanby has been part of the fun for about three years, he said. He usually works on building the truck beds by cutting them into pieces and putting them together.

“It takes about three to four hours to put about 20 of them together…I’m just one of the worker bees,” Hanby said. “Another has a team of painters, another actually sands them. It’s actually quite an operation.”

Hanby said his youngest grandchild still has his truck from years past and adults are also buying trucks to support the program.

“Now this is the fun part. If the kids get the trucks, that will be the best,” he said as he watched the chaos of excited children ensue. “Just this moment. It’s all worth it.”

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, the Klamath Falls Herald and News and the Malheur Enterprise. He was born in Independence, MO, where the Oregon Trail officially begins, and grew up in the Kansas City area.