Toymaker Roy Myatt rocks and rolls with the flow.
The same goes true for all of the wooden toys he makes in his Rock-N-Roll Woodworks shop near the DeKalb County community of Liberty.
How did he come up with the name of his business? That was easy.
“My rocking horses and wooden pull toys. It fits. Everything I make is either gonna rock or roll,” said Myatt, who recently retired after 18 years as a nurse at McFarland Rehab Center in Lebanon.
A carpenter before he became a nurse, Myatt creates wonderful, whimsical rocking horses as well as 10 smaller animals ranging from dogs and cats to dragons and dinosaurs. He also makes a swell wooden top that will spin for more than 2½ minutes.
The craftsman said that a few years before he retired, he got to thinking about how he wanted to spend his time after he left nursing.
“I didn’t want to work for anybody. I wasn’t going to go back into carpentry. I wanted to be by myself. This is a good solution: woodwork. I didn’t want to be in a hurry. I wanted to make quality,” he recalled.
“Seven or eight years ago, I was up at a Kentucky campsite, and I ran into an Amish guy who made toys. I fell in love with his toys, and so I went up to the Appalachian Center for Craft and looked at what they had. There were two rocking horses in there, and they were $300, and I thought, ‘Wow!’ I’d like to make those.”
Giddy-up! So wooden toys made from pine would be the way he opted to spend his autumn years.
“I knew it would be a small shop, so I make small things. These rocking horses are the biggest things I make,” he said of the rockers. His largest horse is 42 inches long and 22 inches high.
“These rocking horses are two-dimensional, but I’m going to make some three-dimensional this winter. That will require a lot of sanding and carving. It will take years to get up a name. This is sort of fast food here,” he said referring to his smaller wooden critters.
Myatt made his first rocking horse just over a year ago. Today, five sit in his stables waiting for young riders to sit in their saddles. He developed his own patterns after researching a variety of rockers and reading a book on how to draw for children.
“It takes me about two weeks of six days and 10-hour days to make one rocking horse. That’s a lot of work,” he said about the horseys, which are put together with more than 40 pieces of wood.
The rocking horses are priced at $550, the pull toys $20 to $25 and tops for $15. Customers can call to set up an appointment at his workshop, which is about 3½ miles south of Liberty on Highway 53. (Myatt’s wooden toys are also available at Bloem Kind Boutique at the Mill in Lebanon, 300 N. Maple St., priced from $29 to $35.)
Raised in Columbia, Tenn., Myatt served in the Navy in the early 1970s as a hospital corpsman in Vietnam. After his discharge, he hitchhiked across the South for couple of years. He was working as a carpenter when he and his late wife moved to DeKalb County 40 years ago.
“I’m dedicated to making heirloom quality rocking horses that will last five generations, and if people take care of them, they will. This is a piece of furniture,” said toymaker Myatt, who, according to the sign beside his mailbox, is an official subcontractor for Santa Claus and whose wooden horses can rock around the Christmas tree in a new old-fashioned way.
