Thirty-three years later, Scarvie has been called a "pioneer and innovator" in the toy industry, having been inducted into one trade association's Hall of Fame and receiving another's Lifetime Achievement Award. Not bad for a temporary job.

At the start of the 1970s, Scarvie was Karen Holland, married to her husband Terry Holland. He was working at a large corporation and was very unhappy at his job. He confided to his wife that he would really love to open just a small, local store, doing something creative with his hands.

She remembered a small store she had patronized called Sandra's Children's Boutique in Old Town Los Gatos. She liked the feel of the place, but the business was failing. After talking it over, the couple decided to buy the small store. They secured a $6,000 loan from the bank, which enabled them to buy the inventory for their new store.

"And that's how we first opened our doors, in 1971," recalls Scarvie. At that point, she still envisioned it as a temporary situation in which she would help her husband get the store on its feet and then go back to her studies and teaching. "I imagined myself spending the bulk of my working hours sitting on that tall metal stool beside the old hand-crank cash register and pouring over my textbooks."

Over the next several years, the business continued to grow.

"I never got back to teaching. I guess the toy store turned out to be just a little too exciting," she says.

However, when Terry Holland died in 1980, Scarvie found herself at a fork in the road.

"I was at a turning point in my life," she says. "What was I supposed to do?" She thought long and hard about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. She knew that she wanted to make a difference in peoples' lives somehow.

Scarvie described a realization she had over the years, which led to development of a philosophy. She credits this experience to watching her own children play.

"I noticed my children got too many toys, but only played with a few of them," she recalls. When asked what seemed to be the attraction of the toys they did play with, Scarvie described what she calls a "good toy." She explains that playing with "good toys" opens a door to a child's imagination and unique inner voice. She said that with good toys, the child, not the toy, is in charge. "I began to see play as a marvelous state of being in which the player feels totally absorbed, present and alive, needing no other reward except the wonderful experience of genuine play."

The following year, Scarvie decided to take a business course. The course she chose involved such up-and-coming business trends as the advent of computers and how companies could—and should—add value to their communities. One of the many teachers for the course was a Silicon Valley businessman who was pioneering computers. He and Scarvie had a conversation, and she described to him her vision of "good toys" as tools that grow and empower the self and the importance of what she calls "open-ended play." The businessman was very interested, and likened it to his vision of computers as open-ended business tools. He encouraged her to get up and share her insights with the class.

Scarvie also knew she was going to be required to participate in a talent show at the end of the course. Being terribly afraid of public speaking, she was desperate for an idea to help get her through. She called up the staff at her store and asked them to send over any toys or puppets that she could use as a prop in her presentation. Her staff sent over Imu, the monkey puppet whose name means "I am you." She used Imu as her emcee for the presentation, to rave reviews.

At the end of the course, Scarvie described feeling inspired. The course confirmed her belief that simply making money is too small a dream, too meager a goal. She wanted to use her toy store to make a difference in the lives of children and parents.

"I wanted the toy industry to be the one that would support healthy childhoods, not the reverse. Our consumer toy culture is not good for children," Scarvie said. "Too often we measure who we are and what we are worth as human beings by how much stuff we have—it's a damaging message for children."

Scarvie opened The Wooden Horse on Blossom Hill Road in 1988. She began presenting "Good Toy Workshops" to audiences of parents and teachers, talking to them about developmental needs of children and the critical nature of play. She showed them how to choose better toys. In time she was being invited to present for trade associations and seminars.

Scarvie has since been written up in trade show publications, and was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Specialty Toy Retailing Association, the first American retailer ever to receive it.

Scarvie will never forget one year, when at a huge industry trade show in New York City, John Barbour, CEO of Toysrus.com called The Wooden Horse the best specialty toy store in the world, bar none, and her a "rock star" in the industry.

In March of 2004, Scarvie was inducted into the Western States Toy and Representatives Association Hall of Fame. Just like old times, Imu the monkey came up to the podium with her to accept the honor.

Now, after more than three decades in the business, Scarvie is thinking of retirement.

"I would love to be able to hand off this business to someone who had the same desire to be a community resource," she said. Scarvie hopes to write a book about all she has learned in her 33 years in the business, her perspective on our media culture's influence on child development, and how she discovered that one truly can "follow their bliss" in life.

The Wooden Horse toy store is located at 796 Blossom Hill Road in Los Gatos. Visit it online at www.woodenhorsetoys.com.