Yale Bulletin and Calendar

December 15, 2006|Volume 35, Number 13|Four-Week Issue

Children can operate the trains themselves using levers.

Yale scientist helps keep museum's
trains chugging along

University staff member Walter Zawalich may not be called "The Man Who Saved Christmas" -- a nickname given to the famous New Haven-based toy inventor and Yale alumnus A.C. Gilbert in 1918 -- but there are some who think of him as a holiday-season hero of sorts.

Gilbert, a 1909 graduate of the School of Medicine, earned his epithet for successfully lobbying the U.S. government not to halt the production of toys in American factories during World War I. Zawalich, a senior research scientist and a lecturer at the School of Nursing, is known at the Eli Whitney Museum in Hamden as the person who makes the former A.C. Gilbert Company's American Flyer line of electric toy trains run smoothly each year.

The vintage toy trains are the focus of an annual holiday exhibit that attracts thousands of children and adults, some of whom return to the Eli Whitney Museum again and again to see the miniature locomotives running along their tracks.

The Yale researcher volunteered his expertise to the museum after he restored the motors of some American Flyer trains he got for Christmas as a child. Zawalich was fascinated with the trains while growing up in Worcester, Massachusetts, but had packed them away when he was in high school. Some 30 years later, his sister, Ellen, asked him if he wanted them back. The trains are now collectibles.

"By then, I had kids and grandkids, so I learned how to fix them," says Zawalich. "After that, I approached [Eli Whitney Museum director] Bill Brown and mentioned that I could fix some of the broken trains in the museum's collection."

One of the vintage train cars designed by the A.C. Gilbert Company, which was located in the Fair Haven section of New Haven.

"It was like an angel visiting us," recalls Brown of Zawalich's offer several years ago to help restore the trains, which range from 40 to 60 years old. "He's given life to the trains by putting in new motors, making them run like new."

The A.C. Gilbert factory, which was located in the city's Fair Haven neighborhood, closed in 1966, so Zawalich has to be resourceful in his quest to obtain motor parts. He has scavenged some parts from other broken American Flyer trains and bought others on eBay. He also located a company in Utah that makes motors that fit the American Flyer trains.

"There are many local people still around who worked at the Gilbert toy factory, and sometimes they offer the museum trains that they had gotten while they worked there," says Zawalich. "There are a number of people who have been very generous in donating trains to the museum. I'm always grateful for that."

While the tin-plated American Flyer trains are considered very durable, the old motors do break down often, and in the past the trains sometimes malfunctioned shortly after the exhibit opened, says Zawalich.

"When Gilbert built the trains, they were intended to run for 15 to 20 hours a year, but at the museum we're running them up to 8 hours every day," the Yale researcher explains.

Since Zawalich has been restoring the trains, malfunctions are more rare, according to Brown.

"There's nothing more discouraging than coming here and seeing trains that don't work," says Zawalich. "I'm here still testing them on the morning of the day the exhibit opens."

The Eli Whitney exhibit, which opened the day after Thanksgiving and runs through Jan. 7, features passenger cars, coal cars, box cars and other train cars. Some run along tracks built into a realistic, historic New Haven landscape designed by Hunter Nesbitt Spence. Scenic artists and a model maker also contributed to the exhibit, which includes a city scene, a circus and farmland.

Just one week after the exhibit opened, Zawalich is thrilled to see the trains running flawlessly when he visits the museum with his five-year-old grandson Owen Donegan. Zawalich is as enthralled with the exhibit as his grandson, who is also a lover of trains.

"See, see, you're moving that train," Zawalich calls out with enthusiasm to a student from New Haven's Wexler/Grant Community School in New Haven, pointing to a locomotive that has just traveled under a tunnel. The teenager is visiting the museum as part of the Dwight Hall Academic Mentoring Program at Yale, which pairs Yale students with youngsters at the elementary/middle school for a long-term mentoring experience.

Zawalich circles the platform on which the trains run, talking excitedly about the trains to his grandson and other museum visitors. He points out a train in a display case -- the same model he received as a gift during childhood -- called The Royal Blue, which was built in 1950.

Yale's Old Campus and the New Haven Green are featured in the realistic landscape through which the trains travel.

"Look how pretty it is," the Yale researcher coos. Then, he fetches fluid from a museum office, carefully pours some into a small vessel in the engine, and shows children how the miniature trains can smoke the same way real ones do.

"We often use this non-toxic, cedar-scented fluid and the aroma is unbelievable," comments Zawalich. "For me, it's the smell of Christmas. It conjures up a lot of memories."

Asked what makes toy trains such a part of the holiday season for many families, Zawalich replies, "I think it's nostalgia," noting that the trains remind people of a simpler, more old-fashioned time, albeit one that is somewhat romanticized.

Zawalich's passion for trains has prompted one of his grandchildren, three-year-old Danny Zawalich, to call his grandfather "Grandpa Choo-Choo."

At the School of Nursing, Zawalich is better known for his work as part of a team that includes his wife, Kathy Zawalich, a research associate, and lab assistant Greg Tesz. The scientists are engaged in research on beta cells, which make and release insulin. The destruction or dysfunction of these cells causes diabetes. The Zawalichs' research, supported in part by the National Institutes of Health, focuses on how beta cells function and on understanding what happens when the cells do not work properly. Their ultimate goal is to create cells that better secrete insulin.

Zawalich says his wife, who was his "high school sweetheart," is very supportive of his train restoration work.

"She puts up with our having train pieces all over the house," comments Zawalich. "She'll come to the museum and see the same thing we see with our grandkids: All the kids who visit the exhibit enjoy the trains just as much. Seeing that excitement, they all become your 'grandkids.'"

At the Eli Whitney Museum, one preschool-aged boy begins to cry as he leaves with an adult visitor. "He wasn't ready to part from trains," Zawalich comments in a sympathetic voice. His own grandson, Owen, is more cheerful about leaving. "I'm sleeping over Grandpa's house tonight," he proudly announces. "He has trains there."

Someday, Zawalich hopes, Owen will be able to carry on his grandfather's work fixing toy trains. "It's a labor of love," says the Yale researcher.

-- By Susan Gonzalez

The Eli Whitney Museum is located at 915 Whitney Avenue, on the Hamden-New Haven border. The trains run noon-5 p.m. Wednesday-Friday; 10 a.m.-3 p.m. on Saturdays; and noon-5 p.m. on Sundays and on Tuesday, Dec. 26. The museum is closed on Christmas and New Year's Day. Visitors to the exhibit can also craft trains of their own with interchangeable wooden parts and tools. The trains link with magnetic couplers. Project kits are $8.

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