It began like a schoolyard transaction: Grover Van Dexter sold his mint American stamp collection to finance his toy store. Second Childhood, which still stands at its original location on the north side of Bleeker Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues, opened June 9, 1969 – his 49th birthday.

Van, as he likes to be called, is today a playful 84. He still mans the store seven days a week, always in the same uniform: a blue polo shirt with “Second Childhood” embroidered in yellow. His once bright-red hair has receded to a pinkish wreath around his head, but an impish grin still flashes across his face whenever he talks about his two passions, toys and acting.

The store occupies a long, narrow space like a broad hallway, giving it a cluttered feel despite its orderly appearance. An orange, hand-carved carousel pony stands in the window. WPA marionettes from the 1930s – Little Red Riding Hood, the Big Bad Wolf, Thomas Edison, Clark Gable – hang from the ceiling. Display cases, which line every wall, are crammed with toys dating from the 1850s to the 1970s,but most are early 20th century.

Browsing through them, it’s easy to be drawn into the dream life of a generation of children that grew up long ago. There are cast- and wrought-iron banks, dollhouse miniatures, farm animals, deep sea divers, wind-up minstrel bands, and tin motorcycles, airplanes, and zeppelins. Mr. Van Dexter describes seeing his customers “zoom back to their childhood” when they see a toy they recognize. “Sometimes they get a little teary-eyed,” he says.

In his years of selling, Mr. Van Dexter has noticed a few trends, some he can’t quite explain. “Popeye, Betty Boop, and Felix are more popular than Mickey Mouse;” “Halloween is hotter than Christmas among holiday toys;” “And soldier collecting is so popular with doctors. I don’t know why, I haven’t figured that out yet.”

A surprising number of toys depict early film and radio personalities, and they are among the priciest in the shop. You can buy a carved soap Shirley Temple or Little Orphan Annie for only $145, but an Amos ‘n’ Andy tin lizzy costs $1,450. A cardboard-and-lead Charlie Chaplin is $1,750, and a doll chair with Laurel and Hardy painted on the seatback is a whopping $2,850. (“Laurel and Hardy toys are very very rare.”)

“A lot of times people will say, ‘Oh I had that, or I wish I had that,'” says Mr. Van Dexter. “I tell them: ‘you can have a second childhood, but it’s gonna cost you a little more than your first childhood.'”

For Mr. Van Dexter, Second Childhood is a second career. His first was on the stage, screen, and TV. At age 20, he began performing with a light opera company in Philadelphia and soon moved to New York. There he studied mime with the same teacher as Marcel Marceau and was part of the Obie-winning cast of the 1962 play “The Coach With The Six Insides,” a singing, dancing, acting, and miming production based on James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.”

Mr. Van Dexter played bit parts and walk-on roles in films starring Walter Matthau, Faye Dunaway, and Kirk Douglas. He did commercials. “I was just getting started in cigarettes and they cut cigarettes out of television,” he says with a shrug. No part was ever too insignificant or too odd. When Elia Kazan asked him to play a small role as an insane asylum inmate in a movie called “The Arrangement,” he jumped at the chance.

Between acting jobs, Mr. Van Dexter worked as a soda jerk at the Whelan’s Drug Store on the corner of 8th Street and 6th Avenue. That’s where, in the early 1950s, he met a young Steve McQueen fresh out of the Marines. “I had a 3-bedroom apartment paying $104 a month,” Mr. Van Dexter recalls. “I couldn’t afford it so I had to rent out the other two bedrooms.” He charged McQueen $35 a month in rent, plus $10 a week for food.

Mr. Van Dexter remembers his soon-to-be-famous roommate fondly: the countless women he entertained in his bedroom (“he was oversexed”), the way he’d try to dance like Gene Kelly in the living room (“he danced nothing like him”).”Steve McQueen, he went right to the top,” Mr. Van Dexter says wistfully.

Occasionally, Van’s old world and his new one intersect. Many film and TV stars have wandered into the shop over the years: Faye Dunaway, Van Johnson, Elliot Gould, Mary Tyler Moore, Michelle Pfeiffer (“ooh la la”), Whoopie Goldberg, Karen Black, Bruce Willis. This has prompted Van him to take up a second line of collecting – from the women, he collects kisses.

After 35 years running Second Childhood, Mr. Van Dexter still seems delighted to be surrounded by so many fine toys. “I’m a Depression baby, so I only had two little toys,” he remembers with a smile while surveying his current abundance. “One was a little cast-iron car – a model T – the other was a little racing car. I remember one Christmas it was no toys, just two oranges. Oranges then were very expensive. I didn’t know that we were poor, starving. I wanted a toy.”

But he worries that, like his favorite toys, his reverence for them is a thing of the past. “Now these kids have so much. They’re overflowing with toys. They don’t take care of them,” he says. “Then you had to take care of them.”