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Mar 30, 2024

Playground of spring riders makes inviting Brooklyn escape

TOWN OF BROOKLYN — His man cave is tough to beat. This is where John Stone stores his collection of more than 200 chainsaws and scores of vintage oil cans and has a color television mounted to the

TOWN OF BROOKLYN — His man cave is tough to beat.

This is where John Stone stores his collection of more than 200 chainsaws and scores of vintage oil cans and has a color television mounted to the wall just past the car hoist.

There’s a lounge chair for comfort, a large fan to ward off the heat and, in an adjacent room of his garage, a workshop jammed with tools, machinery and boxes of corn and garden seeds to plant next spring.

A collection of more than 200 chainsaws and dozens of oil cans fill part of John Stone's workshop, which doubles as his man cave. Stone has lived on his town of Brooklyn property since 1985.

The collections stand in contrast to his other, more visible hobby that fills the front and side yards of his home on Glenway Road just a few hundred yards south of the Green/Dane county line.

Stone’s aluminum zoo includes a weasel, bee, duck, skunk, dolphin, alligator and a hound dog. There’s a donkey, seal, tiger, chicken, zebra and several horses.

And, thanks to Stone’s generosity and mechanical aptitude over the past three decades, his plethora of spring rider critters are more than just static showpieces never to be touched.

The driveway to Stone’s colorful park is always open and is a throwback to playgrounds of the past. That’s when riding an animal-shaped piece of metal attached to a truck spring was commonplace and there was a fear of being flung into the sky.

“Most of it’s just word of mouth and people stopping by,” said Stone, who has no social media accounts to promote his collection. “A lot of them keep coming back.”

John Stone's town of Brooklyn yard is filled with vintage playground equipment, including spring riders — aluminum animals on truck springs. Stone has been collecting the equipment for years and allows neighbors and others who pass by to play on the animals, along with his collection of merry-go-rounds, swing sets and other play structures.

But it’s more than just vintage spring riders, some of which date to the 1960s and many of which have been purchased from public parks departments in Wisconsin and Illinois. There’s a merry-go-round from Delavan, a yellow monkey-bar set from Milwaukee, and spring riders from Monroe, Deerfield and Fitchburg. There’s a swing set from Illinois, a more modern play structure Stone purchased from a Sauk City day care center and a sandbox filled with yellow and black Tonka trucks.

Stone has also built a wooden teeter-totter, an elevated fort and a merry-go-round made from four horses he acquired from the parks department in Harvard, Illinois. The platform for the ride sits on top of an axle and rim harvested from a manure spreader. Perfectly balanced, even a gentle push can keep the ride going for minutes at a time.

“I had the manure spreader out back and just cut one axle off,” Stone said. “Yeah, it goes for a while.”

John Stone's collection has 48 different animal spring riders, but despite scouring internet auctions and sales sites, he has been unable to find a hippopotamus or a buffalo.

But the spring riders are the star. They can still be found in public parks, but many have been replaced by cities, villages and nonprofits with more modern and accessible amenities like fort-like dream parks that include ramps, bridges, tunnels, lookout platforms, climbing walls and overhead tarps to provide shade. The ground is now shock absorbing rubber instead of grass, dirt, concrete or wood chips.

Stone’s 48 spring riders, which can cost between $300 and $500, are anchored in 14-by-14-inch blocks of concrete, each 2 feet thick. A round tree skirt surrounds each, which allows Stone to use his zero radius mower and not need a weed whacker.

John Stone purchased this four-seat spring rider from a parks department in Harvard, Illinois.

The collection began when his sister had an auction. Her late husband had worked for the city of Fitchburg, which years earlier had disposed of several spring rockers. Stone bought a pig and dolphin. He believes there were 50 different aluminum animals in the spring rider series. Stone, who regularly scours eBay, Craigslist and other auction sites, has all but the buffalo and the hippopotamus.

“They’re hard to find,” Stone said. “After I bought the first ones from my sister, I thought it would be interesting. Then I kind of started challenging myself and I started looking around for them. It’s just something to do.”

Stone, 64, grew up as one of nine children on a dairy farm north of Oregon. He purchased his 6-acre property here in the town of Brooklyn in 1985 after it was foreclosed on by a bank. The old dairy barn had fallen down into the foundation, and the farmhouse was covered with asbestos siding. Since that time, Stone, who is divorced and has no children, dove into upgrading the property, where a maple tree with 14.5-foot round trunk sits at the entrance to the driveway.

He built his work shed, home to his man cave, and then ultimately began adding the playground equipment around a sand volleyball court he built shortly after moving in. He has built a war memorial honoring service members that includes a bench made from granite salvaged from the landscaping of a pool in Baraboo. There are scores of concrete statues in the form of deer, birds, squirrels and chipmunks, while angels populate the property, too. The most prominent and meaningful are aligned along a shed in the backyard and memorialize the deaths of three of his siblings, two nieces and a nephew.

Besides playground equipment, John Stone also has a garden of angels that memorializes deceased family members.

Stone built a small greenhouse last year to start the flowers for his 144 hanging baskets and is in an ongoing war with the raccoons who have decimated part of his small sweet corn crop. The remainder is now protected by an electric fence he just installed.

“And it works, too,” Stone said.

For awhile he had gazing balls on the front fence posts along the road but has replaced most them with bowling balls, which are more resistant to the walnuts that fall from three towering trees.

Stone has been a volunteer member of the Brooklyn Fire & EMS Protection District for 42 years and has spent the last 34 years working at Ellis Manufacturing Company, a Verona company that produces bandsaws, drill presses and belt grinders. He’s eyeing retirement in a few years, but his home projects will likely keep him busy for his lifetime, although his yard, bordered by the house and a cornfield, is running out of room for more equipment.

John Stone counts the spring riders he has stored in a trailer at his home in the town of Brooklyn. Most are duplicates of those already installed in his yard, but one, a dinosaur, may be the next to make the yard.

Neighbors bring their children to the playground, and he gets strangers, too, sometimes from out of state. On one occasion last summer, Stone came home from work to find several children with their parents playing in his yard. There was also an ice cream truck parked in the driveway. The driver, who was on his way back from another event, had seen the crowd and pulled in.

“I don’t know how much he made, but he was selling ice cream,” Stone said. “A lot of people stop.”

Stone collects and restores vintage playground equipment but also build his own.

Barry Adams covers regional news for the Wisconsin State Journal. Send him ideas for On Wisconsin at 608-252-6148 or by email at [email protected].

John Stone, 64, grew up as one of nine children on a dairy farm north of Oregon.

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