An old picture on Shorpy showing a little kid in overalls carrying some strange apparatus.
Does anyone else who visits Shorpy on a regular basis think it might be fun to have a thread devoted to examining Shorpy pics? Their comment section is not conducive to ongoing discussions, and the owners there are occasionally a hair snarky.
He’s awfully young to be looking to get his ashes hauled 
It looks like a toy rake, toy shovel, toy hoe, and toy wheelbarrow.
it’s not a “strange apparatus”. There are 3 items in his right hand…a rake, a shovel, and a dustpan–each with its own handle. They look like toys a kid would use to play in the sand at the beach. . And the item in his left hand is also confusing–it’s obviously just a box on wheels with a handle*. But what the kid is doing with all this stuff on a city street, well, I dunno.
*(similar to the classic little red wagon that kids in the 1950’s played with)
Duh…it never occurred to me it was three different things in his left hand :smack:
Third item (“dustpan”) is a hoe, I believe. Otherwise correct. A set of farming toys is my guess.
“Curb Your Dog” circa 1936.
Yep.
Historical note: This young boy grew up, went into farming and started a family. His daughter got mixed up with a traveling salesman.
The rest is history.
According to the caption he is arriving at nursery school, so presumably he’s brought them to school to play with (or possibly for ‘show and tell’).
In the pre-plastic era, children’s toys were always made out of wood. That would include child-sized replicas of adult tools, which would be stylized approximations as could be turned out in a simple woodworking shop.