Toy Story

A Plattsburgh toy vendor remains alive in the minds of longtime locals

Story by Benjamin Pomerance

Go out the back gate of Oak Street School, and take a sharp left onto Margaret. You’re walking down Memory Lane now. Grade-schoolers in Plattsburgh used to make this trip all the time, an after-class sidewalk to paradise. You don’t have to go far. Just a few steps and you’re there. Be sure you look both ways before crossing the street. And as you stand before the long, low building at 226 Margaret Street, try to see it through the eyes of a child.    

The building's a bit different now. Walk in, and you’ll see only apartments. But suspend your disbelief for just a little longer. Go back to when pastures, not strip malls, lined Route 3, a time when small shops thrived and downtown boomed. Go back to when anyone in the area who wanted a toy came to one place, and came there knowing they would find it. Go back to when this was Bennett’s Toy and Hobby Shop.  

"Bennett’s was the only store where you could go and get toys at that time"

Inside, everywhere you look, there are toys. It’s a visual banquet. Shelves line the periphery of the store, and every shelf is crammed with playthings — games, dolls, models, craft sets, stuffed animals. The biggest toys — Flexible Flyer sleds and shiny red wagons and the largest metal Tonka trucks — are on top. You have to ask someone to take them down for a closer look. You also have to ask if you want to see a bicycle. Bikes are usually kept in the back, separate from the rest of the merchandise. Kids go crazy for them, too, particularly those Raleigh racers that always wind up headlining somebody’s summer vacation wish list. In fact, most of the contents of Bennett’s store will wind up on somebody’s wish list. Which is fitting, really. Fitting because the little shop is sort of a wish come true.        

Bennett’s was baptized by fire. Bonnie Bennett Shimko still remembers the day of her Plattsburgh High prom in 1958, because that was the day an arsonist struck her father’s appliance store. Burned down the structure and burned Delbert Bennett out of a job. An ordained minister from Ontario, he had moved to the States to try his hand in the business world, ultimately opening a successful establishment in downtown Plattsburgh. Now, seemingly without motivation, one man had destroyed what another man had built. Delbert Bennett would be starting, quite definitely, from the ashes.     

Shimko says her father was undaunted. “He got up, got dressed like always, and instead of going to work, he walked around downtown until he found a little place that was vacant,” she remembers. “And he began thinking about what he could do.”

The answer lay in his old store’s basement. One holiday season, Bennett had sold toys along with his customary wares of stoves and dishwashers and refrigerators. Just a few items spread out in the basement, things kids could enjoy while their parents shopped for more practical items. The toys sold like wildfire. Now, his old business ruined, Bennett remembered this success and realized he knew what he’d do next. He would become a seller of toys.  

Bennett never fancied himself being a toy vendor. Yet he did, Shimko remembers, yearn to be successful in business. And he wanted to do something in a line of work that would enhance his community. A toy store would accomplish both. Plattsburgh didn’t have a true toy shop at the time. A need was there, a need that needed to be filled.        

What Bennett wanted, Shimko says, was to be the only store in town that specialized in toys. Good toys. The best brands, the latest models, the finest quality. With this vision in mind, Bennett rented that empty downtown building, began selling toys that Christmas, seeing if locals would buy them. They did. Buoyed by this success, he purchased a place of his own, taking over in that long building near Oak Street School. 226 Margaret became Bennett’s Toy and Hobby Shop. And that year, a legacy began.      

"At Bennett’s, they even counted out your change in your hand. You certainly don’t see that now."

There’s a Norman Rockwell scene here somewhere: the small-town toyseller and the community that loved him. Except the painting is blurred. A haze of consistency obscures it. Ask longtime Plattsburgh residents about Bennett’s store, and chances are they’ll remember it. They’ll remember how much they liked it. Yet ask them to pinpoint why they liked it, what specifically they remember, and the haze rolls in. It was very good, they’ll tell you. They missed it when it closed. But exact recollections? Mostly gone — washed away, it seems, by the fact that quality at Bennett’s was not exciting, but expected. Every day, every year, Bennett’s Toy and Hobby just always was good.             

People do try. Want memories? Eunice LeClair has some in her home. “We still have a metal Flyer wagon from Bennett’s hanging in our storage shed,” she laughs. “We used to buy lots of toys there for the kids. It really was very nice.” What made it nice? “They were very helpful,” LeClair says. “They’d carry on a conversation with you while they helped you look for something. Today, if it’s not on the shelf, store employees automatically assume they don’t have it. At Bennett’s, they even counted out your change in your hand. You certainly don’t see that now.”

Plattsburgh resident Peg Myers also recalls the congenial assistance she received at Bennett’s. Moving to town with her husband and three young children in 1964, she was delighted to find a store carrying items for her little ones. “Bennett’s was the only store where you could go and get toys at that time,” Myers remembers. “And it seemed like there were toys everywhere inside. It wasn’t a big store, but every shelf was filled.”

Even for Shimko, the history is somewhat vague. “I missed the toys,” she explains. “When I was the right age to be into toys, my father was selling appliances. By the time he had the toy store, I had moved on to other things.” Still, some of her  recollections are clear. Memories of the kids from Oak Street School who would stop by her father’s store every day on their walk home — sometimes to buy, more often just to look. Images of the Christmas rush, when she would help out her father behind the counter, gift-wrapping Fisher Price toys and hobby horses and “just about every doll you could ever imagine.” Remembrances of prominent Plattsburgh residents in their formative years — City Mayor Donald Kasprzak, Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wylie, noted businessman David Merkel. “To me, they’re kids,” Shimko laughs. “They were kids when they came to the store.”

Mostly, though, like all the rest, she recalls the sense of happiness that seemed to surround her father’s shop. No specifics, just a general warmth that seems to have hit every customer that entered the place. “Anything people would ever want in toys, he had,” Shimko says. “It was like a kid’s paradise.”

Progress ultimately destroyed that paradise. Developers discovered the unexploited land along Route 3 and began building Plattsburgh’s future. The future, Bennett soon realized, didn’t include him. Bigger stores offered lower prices, and the customers eventually followed the sales. “My father couldn’t compete with that,” Shimko says. “It was very, very difficult on him. The business just wasn’t coming anymore.” In 1977, the once-heavy shelves now barren, Delbert Bennett closed the toy store for the final time. He converted the building into apartments that year, maintaining the living spaces until his death two years later.

For some people, though, 226 Margaret will always be Bennett’s Toy and Hobby. “We hated to see it go,” LeClair remembers. “At one time, the whole downtown was filled with great stores like that. It’s sad to think of it now. There’s nothing like that down there anymore.” She stops. “We’re dating ourselves even when we talk about it.”

Shimko says she still can’t pass the place without thinking of the store. The memories still are there, blurred though they may be. So if you’re driving downtown one day and spot somebody staring at a nondescript apartment building, don’t be surprised. Chances are, they’re looking at 226 Margaret the way they once did, the way Delbert Bennett would have wanted them to: through the eyes of a child.    

Do you remember Bennett's Toy and Hobby Shop?

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