For nine years, Vern Heinle has carved and shaped wood into durable, practical toys reminiscent of yesterday to distribute to underprivileged children of today through the Forgotten Children’s Fund, a nonprofit organization.<\/p>\n
Heinle, Kent’s modern day Mister Geppetto, distributes more than 200 of his hand-crafted toys – trucks, tanks, race cars, helicopters and airplanes – to children 12 and under on Saturday, Dec. 17, from 9 a.m. to noon, at Shari’s restaurant, 12990 SE Kent-Kangley Road.<\/p>\n
The holiday toymaking adventure keeps the retired carpenter tinkering in his spacious, well-equipped workshop that sits next to his East Hill home.<\/p>\n
“I enjoy it, I really do,” said the 83-year-old Heinle. “It actually makes me feel good to provide something to people who otherwise would not have it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For nine years, Vern Heinle has carved and shaped wood into durable, practical toys reminiscent of yesterday to distribute to underprivileged children of today through the Forgotten Children’s Fund, a nonprofit organization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":220,"featured_media":25303,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-25302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25302"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/220"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25302"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=25302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}