FORT WALTON BEACH — She jokes that her living room looks like a toy store and that she hasn’t been able to sit on her couch in years. The last part isn’t a joke.
“This is my shipping and receiving area,” says Charlotte Nelson, smiling from the office chair she uses to wheel through her small apartment in Ocean City.
Stuffed animals in various stages of repair fill boxes, bins and bags, and cover most of the furniture in her small apartment. Nelson, who is a “few wrinkles away from 80,” says she sleeps like a wolf, meaning she barely sleeps at all.
That means she spends more than 20 hours most days washing and repairing toys for children she will never meet.
Last year she repaired and gave away 1,600 toys to charities and nonprofit groups. The year before that, she rehabbed 5,000.
Watch a video of Nelson at work. >>
She holds up a cheap white bear with a black thread trailing from its head. It’s a boy, she announces. Grabbing the errant thread firmly, she tugs it out of his head and sets it aside.
“Eyebrow,” she says. “He doesn’t need an eyebrow.
“Poor little thing,” she adds.
The Air Force widow and mother of five was raised in an orphanage during World War II, an experience she looks back on fondly. She’s always been a happy person, she says, listing all of the good things about her childhood.
She had a playground while other kids just had a yard. There was always someone to play with. And though she was separated from her siblings, she got to wave at her little brother in the lunchroom.
“I had this many toys,” she says, gesturing to her colorful collection of misfit donations. “But I had to share them all.”
Nelson looks at a discarded toy and sees possibilities. Picking up a naked, bald baby doll, she shares her plan to make it special.
“She will have a hat,” she says, smiling at the doll. “She will have some clothes. She may have a blankie.”
Nelson still is trying to figure out the best way to wash a pink-striped monkey.
“Cotton stuffing or polyester?” she questions out loud, giving it a squeeze before she sets it aside for another day.
If animals aren’t soft enough, she restuffs them. She checks each one by wrapping her arms around it and giving it a hug.
Fixing up toys and giving them away makes her happy.
“I just do it because it gives me purpose,” she says. “I know the kids are happy to get them.
“Every time I put one of these together, I visualize the child getting the toy. And it’s just a good feeling, a really good feeling.”
Contact Daily News Staff Writer Wendy Victora at 850-315-4478 or wvictora@nwfdailynews.com. Follow her on Twitter @WendyVnwfdn.
