The Toymakers: The Making of An Anerican Icon

The Toymakers

THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN ICON

A Novel By

RAYMOND OLIVER

THE TOYMAKERS

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2011 by Raymond Oliver

All rights reserved.

ROK Press

P.O. Box 22752

Carson City, NV USA 89721-2752

rokpress@yahoo.com

Ebook Edition

ISBN-13 978-0-9858607-0-7

ISBN-10 0985860707

Introduction

When in a toy store or the toy department of a large department store, one is surrounded by a myriad of wonderful characterizations and miniaturizations that allow one to enter a world where, at least for a time, everything becomes just the way its maker wishes or envisions it to be. There are babies to be fed, clothed, bathed and sometimes disciplined for disobeying. Doctors and nurses are needed, sometimes to tend to the family pets. Soldiers, cowboys, swordsmen and policemen perform with honor and courage. There are airplanes that fly, some that crash, and there are cars that race around miniature racetracks or careen through city streets and over mountain passes. Some of them, too, can fly and they often crash. There are wars to be fought, farms to be worked, railroad track to be laid and buildings painstakingly built only to be destroyed in the wink of an eye at the whim of their creator. There is earth to be moved and there are scoundrels to be slain, dragons everywhere, spaceships and aliens and cuddly animals to share little beds and big ones as well.

The toy industry is a marvelous combination of imagination, adaptation and creativity matched by no other. It is a huge business made up of firms of all sizes, and it attracts the scrupulous and the unscrupulous, as well as a dark undercurrent of those whose machinations below the surface sometimes invade the industry and carve out a slice of it for their own purposes.

This is not the story of a person, although people are certainly central to its telling. Rather it is about one of this incredible industry’s unique creations. It covers a short period of approximately ten months in the middle part of the twentieth century. Some of the events are factual, others are woven with threads of plausibility, and the rest fall somewhere in between. It is left to you, the reader, to distinguish between them, if you so choose.

Chapter 1

This was the day Rob had been waiting weeks for. Tony Buglioni had assured him that she would be in his office when he arrived that morning. He parked and hurriedly bolted through the office employees’ side door, up the stairs, past Shirley with barely a Hello and threw his six foot frame through the door into his office.

And there she was, just as he had pictured her, a long-legged blonde in spiked heels and a dark blue velvet dress that clung tightly to her body. A modest neckline revealed just a bit of cleavage. Her sparkling blue eyes had not yet caught his, but he was certain that he saw a glimmer of a smile momentarily cross her ruby red lips when he entered the room. There she was, at last. He reached to touch her, all eleven and one-half inches of her perched majestically on his desk. Her name was Margie.

The concept of a stunningly beautiful fashion doll came from Rob’s wife, Helen, the previous year. Helen, a pretty auburn-haired beauty with soft hazel eyes and an engaging smile, was Rob’s high school sweetheart. Helen’s vision was for a full line of fashion dolls, starting with Margie and then expanding into attractive girlfriends and handsome young men, together with clothes and accessories added as time went on. Rob liked the idea immediately and felt it would be an instant success in the American Dream Dolls line he and Rick had acquired two years previously. Rob shared the idea with Rick, but his partner did not seem to share his interest, and nothing further was done until after Rick left Creative Toys that December for a position as Senior Vice President of Operations at Empire Toys, a larger toy manufacturer in the Los Angeles area. It was after Rick left Creative Toys that Rob asked his chief designer, Antonio Tony Buglioni to sculpt the new doll.

Perfect, beamed Rob. Just as I pictured her."

We’ve got a winner here, Tony. Tom Henderson’s voice boomed from across the room with an approving nod toward Tony, who now had a broad smile on his pudgy face. Rob had invited Creative Toys’ marketing manager to join him that morning, and Henderson tapped his cigar in the ashtray and rose from his chair to take a closer look at Margie. The mid-forties marketing manager was dressed in his usual plaid jacket and this day had chosen to outfit himself in bright orange pants, matching bow tie, and a striped black and orange shirt. A bright orange feather was tucked securely in a black band on his corn-colored straw hat.

Tom’s colorful attire belied a keen marketing mind that Rob and Rick were introduced to by their first sales representative, Vince Young, when it became apparent that the novice young partners in Creative Toys needed a seasoned pro to put together their marketing program when they made their first faltering efforts at making toys.

The jovial marketing manager gave the beaming designer a pat on the back, took a puff on his cigar and looked admiringly at the long-legged beauty in front of them. Wonderful job, just wonderful, Tony, he said while thinking to himself how such a beautiful, delicate creation could have possibly come from the portly chief designer’s stubby fingers.

Tears were being held back from Tony’s deeply set brown eyes. He ran his hand through his greying black hair and swallowed. So you like her, eh? She is a beauty, isn’t she?

Tony’s parents immigrated from Italy just after the turn of the century. He was the youngest of seven children, five older sisters and a brother who died in infancy. They existed in a cramped four room upper flat on the lower East side in Manhattan. He was a nice kid but had few friends. Chubby and a bit awkward, he was picked on at school and often roughed up by neighborhood toughs. Tony never finished high school, having left school to support himself and his mother after his father had a heart attack and died suddenly. He took whatever work he could find, until his mother’s death. He enlisted in the army at the outset of World War II, even though he was nearly forty years old at the time, and served in an infantry battalion first in North Africa and then in Italy, finally ending up in France at the war’s end.

The stocky little Italian was artistic. From an early age, he could draw, and he enjoyed carving animal characters out of pieces of wood. After the war he found his way to the San Francisco Bay Area and enrolled in the California School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, under the GI bill that enabled war veterans to enroll in college at the government’s expense. It was there he learned sculpting and casting, skills he put to use after college when he went to work as a designer for American Dream Dolls, the doll manufacturer in San Francisco that Rob and Rick later took over.

Rob and Rick had been in the toy business for less than three years when Tom Henderson told them about a beleaguered doll manufacturer that had withered away under the inept management of the children of the talented couple who started the business some fifty years earlier. The once thriving company manufactured dolls based on popular storybook characters like Red Riding Hood and Little Bo Peep. Tom Henderson felt the young men could resurrect the line and encouraged them to buy the assets. They were able to negotiate extended payment terms with the owners and acquired the trademarks, molds, equipment and miscellaneous supplies and found themselves owners of American Dream Dolls. Tony came with the acquisition.

Helen helped drive the revitalization of the doll company with ideas for a line of dolls based on current popular figures, and they entered into contracts to produce likenesses of stars like Judy Garland, Lucille Ball, Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. The heads of the figures and dresses were the only differences between the celebrity dolls and the others. The new line would use the same molds as the storybook dolls for the bodies, arms and legs, so there was no additional tooling expense to make new molds for those parts, only for the heads. The celebrity contracts required advance royalties, and Tom Henderson found the capital for them with two investors he had business dealings with over the years. One was Harvey Soule, an heir to the estate of the founder of one of the country’s largest department store chains. Soule received three hundred thousand dollars every calendar quarter from a trust set up by the chain’s founder and was anxious to put the money to work, often in risky ventures, most of which failed badly. The second was Dirk Mason who owned a plastic rotational molding company. As a part of the deal, Creative Toys would subcontract some of their doll molding to Mason’s company.

The celebrity doll line was a moderate success, and together with sales from existing products helped fuel Creative Toy’s expansion into its new quarters on Seventh Street in Berkeley with over 50,000 square feet of warehouse, manufacturing and office space plus room to add additional space if it was needed.

Never rewarded much for his work sculpting dolls by second-generation owners at American Dream Dolls, Tony absorbed all of the adulation Rob and Henderson were willing to send his way. The sales manager had put his arms around the rotund little man’s shoulders, and there were tears in the designer’s eyes now, as the three men focused adoringly on the little creature on the desk in front of them.

It was quite a road that led Rob to Margie, one as unlikely as any could imagine. It began in Rob’s garage in Berkeley, on a rainy January day just six years earlier.

Rob’s mother had been after him to clean out the single car garage that was at the end of the narrow driveway alongside the white stucco, two bedroom cottage they shared on Hearst Street near the University of California campus. Rob conscripted Rick, a fellow classmate in his junior year at Cal, to help, promising to share a six pack of Pabst when they finished.

It was raining outside, and the garage was damp and chilly. A single bulb hung from the ceiling and together with the light that came through the small window over the workbench provided what light there was. They were sorting through the stuff that had accumulated over the two years Rob and his mother had lived in the house: boxes of books, linens, and various accumulated items, some of which came with them from their move from New York four years earlier. There were half-empty paint cans, brushes, cloths left over from sprucing up the house, and pipe and fittings left over from Rob’s installing an irrigation system for her in the back yard. There was a dart board hanging on a nail attached to a stud in the wall at the far end of the garage that diverted Rob’s attention. A gleam came into his eyes. Darts are here somewhere, he said. He rummaged through some boxes around the workbench, and then went to look on the floor under the dart board. Ah, here they are, he beamed, picking three sharply pointed darts out of a small cardboard box. Want to see how good we are with these things?

They stood mid-point in the garage and took turns tossing the darts at the dart board. Several hit the target, others missed and hit the tar paper sheeting on the wall to one side or the other. I saw some pygmies on T.V. last night hunting with blow guns, Rob said. On Wild Kingdom. Those little guys were darned good with those blow guns, could hit a small bird fifty yards away.

Fifty yards. That’s a long way, Rick answered. His eyes fixed on several lengths of pipe they had piled near the garage door. How good do you think we’d be? he asked, moving toward the pipe. He reached down and picked up a piece of half inch pipe that was about three feet long. Think one of those darts would fit in here? Rick wiped off the end of the pipe and slipped in a dart. Yeah, he beamed. Fits good. He walked back and stood near the garage door, lifted the pipe to his lips and blew. The dart screamed toward the wall, missing the dart board just to the right and lodging firmly through the tar paper and into the siding of the garage.

Rob beamed. Wow! he exclaimed. That really flew. Let me try that. Rob’s shot was better, with his dart hitting the round target just inches to the right of the bull’s-eye. That’s really fun.

For the next few minutes, the two of them shot darts at the dart board, with some hitting and some missing. What a great toy a blow gun like this would be, Rick said.

Yeah, great, Rob answered. But too dangerous?

Fun, though, Rick replied. How about if the ends weren’t pointed? What if they were soft, so they wouldn’t hurt?

That would help, but they’d still hurt if you got hit in the face with one of those things, especially at close range, Rob said.

Rick thought for a moment. Yeah, I suppose. But a BB gun could do a lot of damage too, put out an eye or something, and they sell tons of BB guns don’t they? Rob agreed. BB guns are sold everywhere, so why not blow guns with soft tips? You know, if we could make these, we’d sell a ton of them, Rick said. What kid wouldn’t want one. What do you think? We could try it.

Ventures were not new for the two college students, Rob majoring in Chemical Engineering and Rick majoring in Business Administration. Over the four years they had known each other since Rob moved to Berkeley in their senior year in high school, together they had sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door, spruced up and sold used cars they bought as surplus property from the University of California and, capitalizing on Rob’s photographic skills, had taken a series of photographs of San Francisco landmarks that they offered by direct mail to affluent San Francisco neighborhoods. They had even made several sojourns to Reno to try out a card counting system for playing Blackjack that was revealed to them in a book by Edward Thorp entitled Beat the Dealer. They were able to use the system to win a few more dollars than they lost, but, after a while they gave it up, having found it too taxing to concentrate on tracking all of the cards being played while making conversation with the dealer and others at the table to avoid suspicion as to their activities.

As much alike as they were in their interests, they were quite different in appearance and temperament. Rob was slim, and had a sharp thin nose, bright blue eyes, blonde hair, a prematurely receding hairline, a big broad smile and a pleasant, easy outgoing personality. Rick was about three inches shorter than Rob and was stockier, had darkening blonde hair and a ruddy complexion. He was more serious than Rob and less comfortable with gatherings of more than a few people. He lived with his parents in Berkeley’s Thousand Oaks district.

Despite their differences and the undeniable fact that their past ventures had at best met with only moderate success, each of the young men had an entrepreneurial spirit and undaunted optimism at whatever their next undertaking might be.

Leaving the garage clean up to be finished another day, Rob and Rick stepped out into the rain to embark on yet another new venture. They were going to make toy blow guns.

Chapter 2

As soon as Tony Buglioni and Tom Henderson left, Rob swept Margie off his desk and headed out of his office. He apologized to his executive secretary for scurrying past her earlier, and rushed to the parking lot, anxious to get home and see Helen’s reaction when she saw Margie for the first time.

Holding Margie inside his coat to prevent her getting wet, he rushed out into the grey February drizzle and quickly ducked into his year-old white Cadillac Sedan deVille. He settled Margie comfortably in the passenger seat and drove out of the driveway turning right onto Seventh Street then, after a few blocks, left onto Ashby Avenue. It was late morning and traffic was fairly light. Together, Rob and Margie headed up Ashby toward San Pablo Avenue. Rob’s thoughts turned to how far the business had come in just under six years.

After leaving his garage in the rain that January day, he and Rick bought some colored plastic tubing, a piece of small diameter plastic rod, a length of wood dowel and some sponge. They returned later in the day and in the dim light of the garage cut the tubing with a hack saw and smoothed off the openings with some fine grained sand paper. They cut the wood dowels into inch-long pieces and cut the plastic rod into several different lengths. The differing rod lengths would give them several different overall dart lengths with which to experiment. They cut slits in one end of each plastic rod, and paper fins were slipped into the slits. Holes were drilled into one of the flat sides of the little pieces of dowel, and then the plastic rods were shoved into the holes in the dowels. A little piece of the sponge was glued onto the other side of each piece of dowel to become the tip. They were crude, but they served their purpose.

It was dark and getting cold. The