Holiday spirit thriving in a woodshop
Jack Eskeberg and a group of his friends spent a long Thursday evening in mid-November in his woodshop on Spokane’s South Side, working on their donation to the Christmas Bureau – 700 wooden toy trucks.
Some trucks in the Hoo Hoo Express fleet are dump trucks, others are delivery vehicles. All have wooden wheels that work.
The trucks are an unusual donation to this holiday charity. Most donors send money to The Spokesman-Review Christmas Fund, which provides the fixings of Christmas for needy families throughout the Inland Northwest. The goal of the fund this year is $500,000.
So far, $8,647.56 has been sent in over the summer months while people still had Christmas on their minds. From Thanksgiving to Christmas, the newspaper solicits donations and writes articles about the contributors and the needy. Catholic Charities, Volunteers of America and The Salvation Army partner to run the Christmas Bureau, where needy families go to get toys for their children and food vouchers for Christmas dinner.
Donors can give to the Christmas Fund via mail or online, or by bringing donations to The Spokesman-Review offices in downtown Spokane or Coeur d’Alene.
The Christmas Bureau does not usually accept donations of toys for the children; all of the Christmas toys that are given out are new and purchased with Christmas Fund money throughout the year at best prices. The wooden trucks that Eskeberg and the other members of the Hoo Hoo Club made will go to the child-care area at the Christmas Bureau.
Children are not allowed in the toy rooms at the bureau. Rather, while their parents are selecting their Christmas toys, volunteers watch the children in an area enclosed by stacks of cardboard boxes. Each child will go home with one of the toy trucks, as long as they last.
This is the third year Eskeberg and other stalwarts of the woodworking group have made trucks for the Christmas Bureau. This year they had help with the assembly. A group of seventh-grade students at St. Charles School installed the axles and wheels on the trucks.
This came after some Hoo Hoo woodworkers such as Hank Kuhlman, Dennis Miller, Harry Howard, Ken Couch, Dave Barth and Bruce Thompson, as well as others, gathered at the Eskeberg woodshop and worked in a factory line of sorts. They cut wooden blocks into truck shapes with a band saw. They drilled windows with a drill press. Then they sanded and branded each truck with the Hoo Hoo Express designation. The final step is dipping them in polyurethane for durability.
The group of about 12 people has been making wooden trucks for 10 years, at a rate of about 1,500 a year.
“We painted some to go to Honduras and Africa with missionaries. We give them to Camp Fire at Dartlow for the kids there to paint,” said Eskeberg, who was a woodshop teacher at Sacajawea Middle School. “We make everything but the wheels; those we buy from an outfit in San Antonio.”
Volunteers from the bureau pick up boxes full of the trucks at his house for delivery to the bureau when it opens on Dec. 6. Eskeberg said he has not been to the Christmas Bureau but seemed to take delight in the thought of the children playing with the old-fashioned toys.
“That’s really what Christmas is all about,” he mused.