Kansas City, Mo. ? A bookcase filled with handmade wooden toys is tucked in the corner of the small shop called Missys’ Mirror.

There is a fire truck with ladders on the sides, a trailer loaded with 5-inch logs, and an airplane with a propeller that spins.

The toys seem out of place in this nonprofit boutique, which provides items, such as wigs, that cancer patients need, regardless of their ability to pay.

“Who made these?” a shopper asked as she rubbed the smooth, round edges of an old-fashioned coupe. “You really don’t see people making toys like this anymore.”

The toy maker is Ron Wilcox, 69, a retired carpet salesman from Lenexa, Kan. He is the father of Missy O’Neill, one of two women for whom the shop is named.

O’Neill died of breast cancer in spring 2000. She was 36 and left her parents, two brothers, a husband and two young children.

“As a parent, I thought, ‘What can I do?'” Wilcox said. “I don’t have any formal training, you know, as a toy maker. But making toys has helped with the pain. You stay active and busy, and then you’re not spending a lot of time thinking about how rotten things are.

Ron Wilcox uses a nail gun to assemble a handmade biplane in the basement of his Lenexa home. Wilcox makes wooden toys, which he donates to Missys' Mirror. The shop, which helps raise money for breast cancer patients, is at the St. Luke's Hospital Cancer Institute Center for Breast Care in Kansas City, Mo. It is named after his daughter, Missy Wilcox O'Neill, and Missy Newell, both young women who died of breast cancer.

“And Missy was very talented, very artsy, and always encouraging me to make things. She’d say, ‘Dad, you’ve just got to make this or that.'”

Wilcox only makes toys for the shop and his family. Everything is donated. Every penny goes to help keep the shop operating.

When Ron and Linda Wilcox’s only daughter got sick, Ron Wilcox retired so he could help.

When she died, he took his pain to his basement.

‘Made for Missy’

There, he surrounded himself with the tools of his hobby – saws, sanders, routers, drills and lathes. He also was surrounded by memories of his daughter, among them a cradle he had made for her dolls years ago with a simple message on the bottom: “Made for Missy with love from Dad.”

And covered with sawdust was the first project he ever made, with the help of his daughter and one of his two sons. It was a message board you would hang in the kitchen. It has their names written in pencil on the back, dated Valentine’s Day 1976.

The memories comforted Wilcox.

A few years later he won tools in a contest, and he became more interested in woodworking as a hobby. Back then, he would take his youngsters to the basement, helping them with their high school projects.

Since then, he had made a few toys for grandchildren, but really wanted to learn to make better ones. He started reading a weekend projects magazine.

Another goal

After his daughter’s death, he and his family launched another project: to raise money to open a shop to help cancer patients. Through the St. Luke’s Hospital Cancer Institute Center for Breast Care, the Wilcox family met the family of Missy Newell, another young mother who had died of breast cancer in 2000 at 32. The shop also is named for her.

The families spent the next four years spearheading fundraisers to open Missys’ Mirror. When the money was in place and the store set to open last April, Wilcox wanted to do his part.

First, he built shelves for the shop’s walls. Later his wife, who volunteers there, asked, “Why don’t you try to sell some toys?”

“It’s really his therapy,” Linda Wilcox said. “And the shop is truly our salvation.”

Ron Wilcox agreed.

“If the money from the toys will go to help somebody get a prosthesis or a wig, whatever they need to make them feel better about themselves, then I’m happy,” he said.

A happier place

Wilcox has sold about 20 toys. The most popular are the airplanes and fire trucks. It takes him about two eight-hour work days to build one. Then he finishes it off with clear and shiny spray enamel. At a recent holiday open house at the store, in a medical plaza across from St. Luke’s Hospital, customers ordered tractor-trailers, fire trucks, airplanes and doll cradles to give as gifts.

These days, Wilcox’s basement is a happier place.

When he is not making toys for Missys’ Mirror, he is working on his newest project – wooden jigsaw puzzles – and making holiday ornaments with his daughter’s children, Halle, 10, and Kyle, 8, and his other grandchildren.

“I thought a turtle puzzle with the ABCs on each piece of the turtle would be fun,” Wilcox said. “And the minute I took it to the shop, why, they sold it.”