The Mystery of the Blinking Eye

the station wagon down on Twenty-sixth. We can all crowd into it. Betty uses it to take twelve kids to school in her car pool. I’ll take this transformer along and try it,” he told the salesman.
    The Reed apartment was huge. From the moment they went in the door, the visitors knew it was a house filled with love and fun. The boys and little Nancy rushed to meet their father and nearly smothered him with bear hugs. Then, almost immediately, they adopted the Iowans as their “best friends,” to fit the classification already given to the Bob-Whites.
    “Colas, anyone?” Betty Reed asked. Without waiting for an answer, she brought in tall glasses with ice clinking. “Do you want to go into the railroad room now?” she asked with a smile.
    “He had the room designed especially for his trains,” Jim said as they followed their host. “Every single, solitary thing in this whole room Dr. Joe built himself —trains, scenery, towns, everything!”
    “Now, now, not the transformers! Betty helped, too, and the kids, with the rest of it.” Dr. Reed stood just inside the door, quite obviously delighted at the amazement on the Iowans’ faces.
    Before them, on a wide terrain raised about three feet from the floor, they saw the most elaborate model railroad system imaginable. There must have been at least three complete trains, passenger and freight. There were refrigerator cars, coal cars, automobile carriers, piggyback flatcars, cars carrying logs, tank cars, even rolling aquarium cars with live goldfish. There were coaches for passengers, dining cars, club cars luxuriously fitted with upholstered chairs, and, finally, saucy red cabooses to tag at the ends of the freight trains.
    Dr. Joe went up into the control room a few feet above the tracks and set his trains in motion. The young people crowded around, cheering the little engines, watching them whiz over trestles high above - water and snake through long tunnels.
    They watched the vigorous diesel-electric engine pull loaded cars to a mining town halfway up a mountain, then roar back to a village on the plain below. They saw an apparatus on the mail car catch tiny mail sacks from extended poles. Over the tracks the tiny trains flew. Freights were switched aside for main-line passenger trains to pass. In a roundhouse, engines turned for repairs.
    “It’s magic!” Barbara cried as Dr. Joe finally threw the switch and the cars slowed and stopped.
    “It’s the greatest!” Bob rubbed the back of his neck-“I think my head turned completely around trying to see everything! I wonder if Tex and the others are ever allowed to go up in the control tower.”
    “Sure! Dad lets us help with everything,” Tex answered.
    “Only when he’s here, though,” one of the twins added.
    “Climb up here and have a go at it, Bob.” Dr. Joe surrendered the control. “Take it easy... that’s it!”
    Excitedly, Bob watched the cars obey his guiding hand. “I never saw anything like it! Gosh, one thing’s true, Barb... I’m going to shelve the antique cars and start a real, live railroad system. Look at her go! It’d take a lifetime, though, to ever get an outfit like this going.”
    “I guess it would, Bob,” Barbara admitted. “How do you make the scenery, for instance?”
    “It’s a breeze. Even Nancy can tell you how to do it. She made some of the trees up there on the hill,”
    Dr. Joe said, pointing toward a cluster of tiny trees.
    “Yeah, the crooked ones,” Chris said with brotherly frankness.
    “They’re made from pieces of sponge, or sponge rubber, dyed and glued to balsa sticks,” Tex said. “We make the tunnels out of paper soaked in water and mixed with paint sizing. It turns into papier-mâché, and we pile it on top of wire forms, then color it brown to mark the entrances and exits.”
    “You tell them, Jeff, how we make the mountains,” Dr. Joe suggested.
    “They’re made of burlap covered with patching plaster—painted brown, of course.”
    “We make the grass out of pieces of Turkish toweling dyed and glued to the ground,” Chris explained.
    “The only thing Mom does is to feed the animals and clean up after them,” Mrs. Reed said.
    “That’s the biggest part,” Dr. Joe said, putting his arm around his wife and smiling.
    “Speaking of eating—and my characters are always doing that—” Betty Reed said, “can’t you all stay and have dinner with us? We’d love it.”
    “All this gang?” Trixie said, aghast. “Heavens, no!