Marx Toys: How America’s Biggest Toy Empire Vanished Overnight ?

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: in 1955 one out of every five toys sold in America came from the same company that company's advertising budget for the entire year was three hundred and twelve dollars not three hundred and twelve thousand not three hundred and twelve million three hundred and twelve dollars the company was Louie Marx and Company three factories more than five thousand products fifty million dollars in annual revenue that December Time magazine put the founder on its cover his face eclipsing Santa Claus himself and called him the toy king he was the largest toy manufacturer on earth 17 years later his company was gone the factories were closed the workers were let go the molds were auctioned off in lots at a Sotheby's sale in New York City and on the exact day a federal court declared the final end of his life's work Louis Marx died same day same hour so how does the largest toy company in the world disappear so completely that most Americans today have never heard its name Glendale West Virginia 1934 to 1980 this is the story of what a cereal company did to the greatest toy factory America ever built and why almost no one remembers it happened Brooklyn New York 1896 Louis Marx was born the son of Austrian Jewish immigrants in a city that did not reward sentiment it rewarded speed instinct and the ability to see what other people had not yet noticed he graduated high school at fifteen not because he had to because he was done waiting by sixteen he was working for Ferdinand Strauss one of the largest mechanical toy manufacturers in New York he was not in the back he was not sweeping floors within a few years Louis Marx was managing Strauss's production plant in East Rutherford New Jersey running the floor watching the machines learning every inch of how a toy went from raw material to retail shelf then he disagreed with the board over sales policy the board voted him out Marx enlisted in the United States Army as a private he came home a sergeant in August 1919 he and his brother David incorporated the company had no factory no products no inventory what it had was a name Louis Marx and company and a philosophy that would drive every decision for the next 50 years give the customer more toy for less money his first move buy the tooling rights to two toys that Strauss had abandoned old designs played out by conventional thinking Marx made subtle changes cut the cost and put them back on the market he sold more than eight million of each within two years by 1922 Louis Marx was 26 years old and a millionaire so was his brother David there was no secret formula no outside capital no patent on a breakthrough product there was only one one principle applied without compromise find what people want make it better than anyone else and make it cheaper than anyone thinks is possible he would spend the next 50 years proving that principle correct and then in one decision he would walk away from everything it had built the 1920s were good to Louis Marx not because the decade was easy but because he understood something that most manufacturers did not the best time to sell an inexpensive toy is when families do not have much money and the best way to sell it is to make it so well that no one feels the need to apologize for buying it the yo-yo was not his invention he knew that he did not care what mattered was that he could make it faster cheaper and in greater volume than anyone else during the 1920s Louis Marx and company sold 100 million yo-yos then the depression came and Marx grew while other manufacturers contracted laid off workers and shuttered plants Marx expanded into the communities that needed jobs most in the early 1930s he acquired factories in Erie Pennsylvania and Girard Pennsylvania he bought into distressed industrial towns and put people back to work making toys that families could still afford in Girard he acquired the assets of Girard model works and with it entered the toy train business Marx trains would never carry the prestige of Lionel but they would outsell Lionel for most of the late 1950s that was the Marx way not the finest not the most expensive the most then came Glendale West Virginia in 1934 Marx purchased a shuttered aircraft plant on the banks of the Ohio River a quarter-mile long facility that the Fulker Aircraft corporation had abandoned after the Depression killed their business the building was enormous the price was it in 1934 in 1948 in 1949 he added a plastic production wing the future was plastic and Marx was not going to be left behind by 1951 Louis Marx and company operated 12 factories worldwide plants in Pennsylvania West Virginia England and beyond he had started with two old tin toys and a philosophy now he had an empire and in four years the whole world would know his name December 12th 1955 time magazine hit newsstands across America with a cover that said everything about where the toy industry stood that year the image Louis Marx his face filling the frame Santa Claus reduced to a small figure behind him the headline called him the toy king he had earned it that year Louis Marx and company generated 50 million dollars in revenue for context Mattel which would eventually become the largest toy company in the world had $6 million in sales that same year Marx was not ahead of the competition Marx was in a different category entirely one out of every five toys sold in America in 1955 carried a Marx label the catalog ran to more than 5,000 individual products Ford Apache Ben Hur Roy Rogers the Flintstones Johnny West rock 'em sock 'em robots doll houses mechanical cars tin wind-up toys that could survive being thrown down a flight of stairs play sets so dense with pieces that the box itself felt like a promise open this and you will have everything you need and the price always the price a Marx play set rarely cost more than four to seven dollars the giant sets the ones that came in boxes the size of a small suitcase might run 10 or 12 dollars these were toys that a factory worker could buy for his kids at Christmas without choosing between the toy and the electric bill that was not an accident that was the entire point at Glendale the scale of production was difficult to comprehend the assembly lines ran continuously through the peak season when the big wheel line came online the plant was producing 9,000 units every single day per shift when the Johnny West action figure series was in full swing Glendale was assembling 3,000 figures every eight hours more than 2,000 workers ran those lines at the height of production in the early 1960s multiple generations of the same families men and women who had started right out of high school and never left because why would you leave a place that was making the toys that every kid in America wanted under the Christmas tree but there was a number that told a different story in 1955 the same year Marx appeared on the cover the cover of time the same year the company posted 50 million dollars in revenue the total advertising budget for Louis Marx and company was 312 dollars not a typo 312 dollars for the entire year for the largest toy company in the world across town in a different kind of office Mattel was spending five hundred thousand dollars on advertising they were sponsoring the Mickey Mouse Club on ABC talking directly to children every week in their living rooms planting the name Mattel into the minds of an entire generation before those children were old enough to ask their parents for anything by brand name Louis Marx saw this he was not blind he simply did not believe it mattered Marx had built his empire through Sears Roebuck and company through catalog sales through retail relationships through the simple logic that a great product at a great price would find its customer it had worked for 30 years why would television change that he had six principles for what made a great toy familiarity surprise skill play value comprehensibility and sturdiness six principles none of them were about desire none of them were about aspiration none of them were about making a child see something on a screen and feel in their chest that they had to have it that was the gap and in 1955 it was still small enough that no one not even Marx could see it clearly but Mattel could feel it and they were filling it one 30 second commercial at a time Louis Marx was the toy king he had the cover of time to prove it he had 50 million dollars in revenue 5,000 products and the largest toy factory on earth humming at full capacity in a converted aircraft plant on the Ohio River he had everything except for a plan for what came next the crack did not appear overnight that is the thing about structural failures they rarely announce themselves they developed slowly in places no one is watching until one day the weight of everything above them becomes too much to hold for Louis Marx and company the crack had a name television not the medium itself Marx would eventually begin advertising on television in 1959 the crack was the four-year gap between when Mattel started and when Marx followed in the toy business four years is a generation of children four years of Saturday mornings four years of 30-second commercials landing in living rooms across America telling children not just what toys existed but which toys they were supposed to want Mattel understood something that Marx refused to accept by the time a child stood in a store aisle holding a toy the decision had already been made it had been made on the couch in front of the television two weeks earlier the store was just where the transaction happened barbie launched in 1959 hot wheels in 1968 both products were engineered from the start for television both created categories of desire that Marx had no answer for Marx had fort apache Marx had johnny west Marx had 5000 products in a catalog that covered everything from doll houses to space stations but a catalog is something a parent reads a television commercial is something a child feels by the mid-1960s Marx was still the largest toy company in america by volume the numbers still held but the momentum had shifted quietly irrevocably toward the companies that had learned to sell to children directly over the heads of their parents and louis marx was getting older he turned 70 in 1966 he was still coming into the office still involved still capable of the instincts that had made him a millionaire at 26 but the toy industry he had built was no longer the toy industry he understood the business had moved from manufacturing logic make it well make it cheap make it fast to marketing logic where perception and desire mattered as much as the product itself Marx had no successor waiting to bridge that gap his children were accomplished people his daughter patricia had become an activist author and the second wife of daniel ellsberg the man who leaked the pentagon papers in 1971 louis marx senior had spent his life befriending generals and building military play sets he considered ellsberg a traitor the family fracture was real and personal and unresolvable his son louis jr was a venture capitalist and philanthropist not a toy man none of his children wanted to run a toy company marx had built an empire that was entirely dependent on the vision and instincts of one man and that man had not built the systems the management depth or the successor generation that could carry it forward without him he knew it near the end he said it plainly toys is a young man's business it was the most honest thing he ever said about his own situation he had built something extraordinary he had run it with genius for 50 years and now he was old his family was fractured his industry had changed beneath him and there was no one standing behind him who knew what he knew the question was not whether to leave the question was what would happen after he did in 1972 louis marx answered that question by doing what a generation of american founders did when they had no one to pass the torch to he sold and the man he sold to did not make toys he made oatmeal to understand what happened next you need to understand what was happening across american business in the late 1960s and early 1970s it was the age of the conglomerate large corporations food companies chemical companies media companies had decided that the safest way to grow was to stop doing one thing well and start doing many things adequately diversification was the word in every boardroom the logic was simple if one division struggles the others carry it spread the risk buy something profitable extract the value move on the toy industry was a target general mills had already moved between 1967 and 1970 they acquired kenner parker brothers lionel and mpc the plastic model kit company quaker oats had acquired fisher price in 1969 when fisher price founder herman fisher retired the playbook was identical find a profitable toy company whose founder is aging out buy it at a fair price and plug it into your existing consumer products infrastructure louis marx was 75 years old he had no successor his company was generating steady cash flow he was by every metric the conglomerate era used to identify targets exactly what quaker oats was looking for in april 1972 the deal closed louis marx and company was sold to the quaker oats company for more than 50 million louis marx retired he was 76 years old the logic from quaker's perspective was not unreasonable they already owned fisher price toys for young children marx made toys for older children together they could cover the full arc of american childhood from toddler to teenager under one corporate umbrella the synergies on paper were real the problem was the paper fisher price made simple durable toys with consistent year-round demand and predictable margins marx made complex seasonal products enormous play sets trains doll houses riding toys whose entire business model depended on a christmas rush that could make or break the annual numbers in a six-week window fisher price management understood their business with precision they did not understand marx's business at all quaker put fisher price executives in charge of mark's operations it was like asking a baker to run a shipyard the tools were different the rhythms were different the risks were different and the people making the decisions had no feel for any of it the damage came quickly and it came from multiple directions at once military toys had been a cornerstone of marx's product line for decades fort apache battleground the plastic soldier sets that came in bags of a hundred figures for less than a dollar louis marx had served in world war one he had spent his career befriending generals eisenhower macarthur omar bradley his affection for the military was genuine and it was reflected in everything the company made quaker oats was not comfortable with this the company's name carried the weight of quaker faith a tradition historically associated with pacifism and conscientious objection in the early 1970s with vietnam tearing the country apart in anti-war sentiment at its peak selling military toys under a banner that read manufactured by marx a subsidiary of quaker oats created an image problem that quaker's management did not want to manage according to industry reporting from the period the military toy lines were curtailed nothing replaced them then came the second mistake by the early 1970s the first wave of electronic toys was beginning to reach the market simple handheld games early led devices the technology was crude but the direction was clear the next generation of children was going to want something that beeped and lit up not something that required them to set up a ford on the living room floor quaker made a deliberate decision not to move marks into the electronic toy market they were a food company electronics were not in their vocabulary again nothing replaced what they had chosen not to pursue by 1974 marx was operating at a loss the company that quaker had paid more than 50 million dollars for the company that had generated 50 million dollars in a single year just two decades earlier was bleeding money under management that did not understand what it owned quaker began looking for an exit in late 1975 they closed the erie plant marx's oldest american factory the one the workers had called the monkey works for 50 years nearly 600 people were employed there when the announcement came 440 of them lost their jobs immediately the official statement cited consolidation of manufacturing the reality was simpler quaker was stripping the company down to make it easier to sell it had taken four years four years to take the largest toy company in the world and reduce it to something that no serious buyer would want at any price in april 1976 quaker oats found a buyer anyway they sold what remained of louis marx and company for approximately 15 to 18 million dollars roughly one-third of what they had paid the buyer was a british conglomerate named dunby comebex and they were already in trouble of their own dunby comebex was not a stranger to the marx name the british conglomerate had purchased marx's united kingdom subsidiary back in 1967 nine years before they bought the american operation they knew the brand they knew the products they knew better than almost anyone outside the company what marks had been at its peak and what it had become under quaker's management they bought it anyway which raises the question that no clean financial narrative can fully answer why would a company in its own precarious position take on a failing american toy manufacturer at the precise moment the american toy market was beginning its most disruptive decade since the invention of television the answer most likely is that dunby comebex believed they could do what quaker could not run a toy company like a toy company they had the industry experience they had the existing relationship with the marks brand in europe and they were buying at a price so far below what the assets were theoretically worth that even a modest recovery would justify the purchase they renamed the operation dunby comebex marks the gerard plant marx's toy train factory in pennsylvania continued to operate under the new ownership glendale continued as well on the surface there was still a company there were still workers there were still orders being filled and trucks leaving the loading docks but underneath the surface the trajectory was fixed dunby comebex marks was not investing in new tooling not commissioning new product lines not building the next generation of marks toys that might recapture the shelf space that mattel and hasbro were claiming week by week they were running the existing operation on the momentum of what had already been built filling orders for products that had been designed years sometimes decades earlier and hoping that momentum would last long enough to matter it is a particular kind of corporate death not sudden not dramatic just a slow steady diminishment each quarter a little smaller than the last each christmas season a little less than the one before until the gap between what the company costs to run and what it earns from running becomes impossible to close by the late 1970s that gap had become impossible to close the numbers told the story that the press releases did not in fiscal year 1975 still under quaker's ownership mark's sales had fallen 14 percent from the prior year the company had operated at a loss in 1974 these were not temporary fluctuations they were the early readings of a structural collapse that no change of ownership was going to reverse dunby comebex marks pressed forward the gerard plant ran through the late 1970s its workforce reduced but its lines still moving glendale kept producing big wheels play sets the remaining action figure lines with a workforce that had shrunk from more than 2 000 at the peak to fewer than 800 by the end of the decade those 800 workers were doing what mark's workers had always done showing up running the lines building toys for children they would never meet in towns they would never visit for a christmas morning they could imagine even if they could not see it they called themselves santa's helpers they had called themselves that for 30 years what most of them did not know what no official communication made clear was that there was no plan to save what they were building no new investor waiting in the wings no product breakthrough that was going to reverse the decline the company they were working for was not being managed toward recovery it was being managed toward its end the toy industry had moved on electronic games were no longer a curiosity they were a category the atari 2600 launched in 1977 children who might have spent their allowance on a ford apache play set were spending it on cartridges instead the hobby shop that had once stocked mark's trains was giving more shelf space to dungeons and dragons the living room floor that had once hosted an entire civil war in plastic was now occupied by a television screen and a joystick marks had no answer for any of it not because the answer did not exist but because the people who owned the company in those final years were not looking for one they were looking for an exit in january 1980 the exit arrived not for the owners for the workers to understand what was lost in january 1980 you have to understand what glendale was not the factory the place glendale west virginia sits on the eastern bank of the ohio river a few miles south of wheeling in the narrow corridor of the northern panhandle where west virginia presses itself between ohio and pennsylvania like something that almost didn't make it onto the map it is not a city it was never a city it was a working town the kind of american place that exists because a factory existed first and everything else the houses the diners the schools the sense of shared purpose grew up around it the factory came in 1934 when louis marx purchased the abandoned folker aircraft plant and converted it into a toy production facility within a decade it was the largest toy producing plant in the world within two decades it was the economic backbone of an entire community that had built its identity around the rhythm of the production line you started at marks out of high school your father had started at marks out of high school your mother worked the assembly line during the christmas rush your uncle was a foreman in the paint department your neighbor drove the loading dock the plant ran multiple shifts during peak season and the overtime checks were what paid for the additions on the houses and the trucks in the driveways and the christmas presents under the trees the irony of which was not lost on the people who made their living making christmas presents for everyone else they called themselves santa's helpers not because management told them to because it was true when the big wheel line was running at full capacity the plant was producing 9 000 tricycles every single day 9 000 workers on the line did not think in terms of individual units they thought in terms of the line itself the rhythm of it the way a shift had its own momentum that carried you through eight hours without you quite noticing the time passing that rhythm was the job and the job was the town by the late 1970s the rhythm had changed the orders were smaller the seasonal surges were shorter the overtime that had once stretched into late november was ending earlier each year workers noticed they talked about it in the parking lot after shifts in the diners on the main street in the kitchens of the houses that the marks paychecks had built but notice is not the same as knowing and knowing is not the same as being told no one told them what was coming january 1980 the announcement came without theater there was no press conference no statement from a corporate executive flown in from a distant headquarters no managed messaging designed to soften the blow the notice went up the plant was closing 800 workers the men and women who had kept the lines running through the long decline of the 1970s who had shown up every shift while the ownership changed twice above their heads and the product line shrank around them were laid off permanently people who were there that day and who were interviewed years later for the book memories of mark's toys glendale described the same experience disbelief not because they hadn't sensed it coming but because sensing something and having it confirmed are two entirely different things you can feel a storm approaching for days and still be shocked when the rain arrives some workers did not believe it was permanent they had seen seasonal layoffs before short furloughs a few weeks then a callback when the next production cycle started this felt like that except that the callback never came the gerard plant in pennsylvania closed at the same time approximately 1200 additional workers most of them seasonal employees hired for the christmas rush were furloughed the toy train factory that marks had built from the assets of gerard model works the facility that had produced marx's o gauge and ho scale trains for nearly five decades went silent dunby combeck's marks filed for bankruptcy in united states federal court southern district of new york louis mark senior was 83 years old he was living in scarsdale new york eight years removed from the company he had founded he had sold it because he believed it was time because he had no one to pass it to because he had said plainly that toys is a young man's business and he was no longer a young man he had not anticipated quaker oats he had not anticipated dunby combeck's he had not anticipated that the 50 million dollars he had accepted for his life's work would turn out to be the price of its destruction whether he knew in those final months the full shape of what had happened to what he built no record confirms he was old he was private the company bore his name but had not been his for nearly a decade what is confirmed is this the federal court gave the bankruptcy estate two years to find a buyer for the remaining assets two years for someone anyone to come forward and say that what louis marks had built in glendale west virginia was worth saving the deadline was set for may 5th 1982 no one came the question has followed marks's story for 40 years how does the largest toy company in the world a company that put one out of every five toys under american christmas trees at its peak a company that employed thousands of workers across three states a company whose founder appeared on the cover of time magazine above santa claus himself how does that company disappear so completely from the american memory the answer is not simple but it is not mysterious either it is made of four specific failures each one invisible on its own devastating in combination the first failure was the absence of a single iconic product aurora had the frankenstein mattel had barbie hasbro had gi joe each of those companies could be summoned in the mind of an american adult born between 1955 and 1970 with a single word a single image a single image a single object that carried the weight of the entire brand marks had 5 000 products ford apache johnny west rock'em sock'em robots the big wheel ben-hur the flintstones playset the white house replica the tin wind-up cars the train sets 5 000 products across 60 years of production each one well made each one fairly priced none of them singular enough to become the thing that people mean when they say the name when you make everything nothing defines you the second failure was television or more precisely the decision to treat television as an expense rather than an investment children who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s did not remember toy brands because they saw them in a sears catalog they remembered them because they saw them on saturday morning between cartoons in 30 second bursts of pure manufactured desire the commercial did not just show the toy it showed other children playing with the toy laughing winning belonging to something it told the child watching this is what you are missing this is what you need marks never mastered that language they started too late spent too little and never built the kind of brand loyalty that lives in the nervous system rather than the memory by the time a child of the 1970s was old enough to feel nostalgia the toys they remembered by name were the ones the television had told them to want mark's toys were often in their homes just not in their minds the same way the third failure was what happened to the brand after the company died when a toy company closes cleanly when its intellectual property is sold intact to a single successor the brand can survive the factory aurora became polar lights the kits came back the name carried forward collectors had something to point to marks disintegrated into pieces the big wheel went to alpha international rock them sock them robots eventually landed at mattel the johnny west line scattered the fort apache tooling changed hands more than once there was no single company that picked up the mark's name and said we are the continuation of this we are what comes next without a successor there was no story and without a story there was only silence the fourth failure was geography when bethlehem steel closed it closed in a city that journalists covered and cameras found when the detroit auto plants contracted the contraction happened in a place that the national media already understood as a symbol of american industrial decline glendale west virginia was not that place it was a small town on the ohio river that most americans could not locate on a map when the plant closed in january 1980 the story ran in the local paper it did not run on the network news it did not become a symbol of anything larger than itself even though it was in every measurable sense exactly that four failures no single hero product no television legacy no unified successor no national spotlight any one of them might have been survivable together they guaranteed the forgetting the bankruptcy court gave the estate two years two years for someone to come forward two years for a buyer any buyer to look at what remained of louis marx and company and decide that it was worth saving the factories were gone the workers had been let go but the intellectual property was still there the molds were still there 5 000 product designs 60 years of accumulated tooling the brand name that had once appeared on one out of every five toys sold in america all of it sitting in legal limbo waiting for someone to claim it the deadline was may 5th 1982 chemical bank of new york held the position of preferred creditor they had appointed david strauss and company as liquidator the liquidator had contacted american plastic equipment incorporated a company interested specifically in the intellectual property and the steel production molds as the most likely purchaser of the non-real assets but a buyer for the whole operation for the name the legacy the idea that louis marx and company could be reconstituted as something that made toys again never materialized the reason was not sentiment sentiment does not factor into bankruptcy proceedings the reason was the market by 1982 the toy industry had been reshaped by forces that no amount of ford apache tooling could reverse the atari 2600 had been on the market for five years pac-man had arrived in american living rooms the children who were the right age to want a marks play set in 1982 were the same children who were begging their parents for a joystick and a cartridge the shelf space in the toy aisle that had once been measured in linear feet of play sets and train sets was being handed over year by year to plastic cartridge cases and blister-packed electronic games no one was going to rebuild louis marks and company in 1982 the world that had made louis marks and company possible was gone two years passed no buyer came forward on may 5th 1982 the federal court declared the liquidation final the assets of louis marks and company everything that remained of 63 years of manufacturing of three factories of 5 000 products of the empire that a brooklyn kid had built from two abandoned tin toys and a philosophy were formally and legally dissolved chemical bank received the assets as the preferred creditor american plastic equipment purchased the intellectual property and the steel molds the tools the trade names and the production rights were parceled out to various companies the name marks appeared on fewer and fewer boxes then on none it was over and on that same day may 5th 1982 in a house in scarsdale new york lewis marks died he was 85 years old no one has ever been able to say with certainty whether louis marks knew in his final hours that the court deadline had arrived he was 85 he had been removed from the company for a decade the legal proceedings of a bankruptcy estate are not the kind of thing that finds its way to a dying man's bedside but the fact of it remains regardless of what he knew the man in the company he had built the company that bore his name that had been the largest toy operation on earth that had employed thousands of workers in three states and put toys under the christmas trees of millions of american families left on the same day same date same calendar square there are people in glendale and moundsville who have never quite gotten past that detail it feels to them like something that should mean something like the universe had enough respect for louis marks to wait until the paperwork was finished before it let him go what he left behind in glendale was not nothing the workers he had employed the men and women who had run his lines for decades who had assembled 9 000 big wheels a day and 3 000 johnny west figures a shift had built lives around that factory houses families futures that were supposed to extend beyond any single employer when the plant closed those futures did not disappear but they had to be rebuilt quietly and without ceremony in a region that was running out of employers to rebuild around the ohio valley was losing factories the way a forest loses trees in a drought one at a time then in clusters until the landscape looked different enough that you stopped expecting it to look the way it used to marks was one tree in that forest a large one but not the last what he left behind in the broader culture was harder to name the toys survived not in production but in attics in basements in the glass cases of collectors who had spent decades decades hunting down mint in box fort apache sets and sealed big wheel units and pristine tin wind-up cars from the 1930s the marks toy museum opened in moundsville in 2001 a mile from the old glendale plant founded by a collector named francis turner who had spent 20 years gathering what the bankruptcy had scattered the museum ran for 15 years the history channels american pickers came through the artifacts held but artifacts are not memory and memory is not legacy legacy requires a story that gets told a name that gets passed down a successor who says this is where we came from and this is what it meant marx never got that successor not in the family not in the corporation not in the culture what he got instead was the silence of a name that most americans under 50 have never heard and a question that the silence makes impossible to avoid how do you build something that large and leave so little trace when a factory dies two things happen to what it leaves behind the physical plant the building the land the machinery bolted to the floor passes to whoever holds the debt it gets repurposed or demolished or left to stand empty until someone finds a use for it the building in glendale the old foker aircraft plant that lewis marks had converted into the greatest toy factory in the world stood idle for 26 years after the closure in 2006 warren distribution purchased the site and converted it into a blending and packaging facility for industrial lubricants from aircraft to toys to oil the other thing that happens is the auction in new york city at the sotheby's park bernet sales room at 171 east 84th street known in the trade as pb 84 the contents of the erie plant were sold over three days in 1977 the sale was catalogued as number 599 more than 350 lots tin toys prototypes sample units molds tooling the physical memory of 50 years of american toy manufacturing organized into numbered lots and sold to the highest bidder collectors came from across the country some bought single items some bought entire lots the toys that had been made by the millions the wind-up cars the mechanical banks the tin figures that had survived being thrown downstairs by children who would now never throw them again became overnight rare objects the scarcity that the factories closure created was the same scarcity that made everything it had produced suddenly precious the intellectual property followed a different path american plastic equipment incorporated purchased the marks molds and production rights through the bankruptcy liquidation the steel tooling the physical dies that had shaped every plastic soldier every fort apache wall section every johnny west figure that had ever come off the glendale line changed hands quietly without ceremony in the language of a legal proceeding rather than a farewell some of those molds survived some did not the product rights scattered the big wheel continued in production under alpha international the name marks nowhere on the packaging rock'em sock'em robots eventually reached mattel who reissued it successfully enough that an entire generation of children grew up with the toy and no knowledge of where it had come from the fort apache and johnny west lines changed hands more than once without finding a home that committed to them fully the name marks appeared on boxes less and less frequently through the 1980s and 1990s then it disappeared from retail entirely what remained was what collectors had saved and what one man in moundsville west virginia had spent two decades gathering into a single place before the world forgot there was anything left to gather the town did not recover quickly that is the honest answer and it is the only answer that respects the people who lived it glendale and the surrounding communities of the northern panhandle to send a standard in detritory that then moundsville mcmechan wheeling had built their economic identity around manufacturing steel glass chemicals toys the ohio river corridor had been for most of the 20th century one of the most productive industrial stretches in america by 1980 that corridor was coming apart the steel mills were contracting the chemical plants were reducing head count and now the toy factory the one that had employed multiple generations of the same families the one that had provided the overtime checks that paid for the houses and the trucks and the christmas the local workers who had been in the building the 800 workers who had been laid off in january 1980 did not have a simple path forward many of them had spent their entire working lives inside that quarter-mile building the skills that made you valuable on a marks assembly line the ability to run a specific machine to maintain a specific production rhythm to manage a specific seasonal surge did not translate cleanly to the jobs that remained in a region that was running out of industrial employers some found work some did not some left the valley entirely following the same routes that appalachian workers had been following for a generation north to ohio west to indiana wherever the next factory was still running the ones who stayed watched the building stand empty for 26 years it was francis turner who decided that the memory of what had happened inside that building deserved something better than silence turner had begun collecting mark's toys in 1982 the same year the bankruptcy became final the same year lewis marks died he attended toy shows he tracked down former employees he listened to their stories the way an archivist listens understanding that the stories themselves were the primary documents that the people who had run the lines and managed the paint department and driven the loading dock were the only ones who could say what the place had actually been in 2001 he opened the official marks toy museum in moundsville west virginia one mile from the old glendale plant the space was a former grocery store 4 000 square feet designed around a 1950s theme inside more than 300 marks play sets many of them mint in box tin toys 10 toys prototypes one of a kind sample units store displays the physical record of 60 years of american toy manufacturing gathered by one man who understood that if he did not gather it it would scatter beyond recovery the museum ran for 15 years the history channels american pickers came through former employees brought their grandchildren people drove from several states away to stand in front of a sealed fort apache box and feel something they could not quite name on june 30th 2016 the museum closed the income could not sustain the facility the collection was distributed to museums across the country pieces of it now in institutions that may or may not tell visitors where they came from the marks toy museum is gone the building in glendale is an oil distribution facility the workers are in their 70s and 80s now the ones who are still alive they remember the rhythm of the line they remember the overtime they remember calling themselves santa's helpers without irony because that is what they were they remember a factory that most of america has already forgotten louis marx was right about almost everything he was right that a great product at a fair price would find its customer he was right that mass production could democratize things that had previously been luxuries that a factory worker's child deserved the same quality of toy as a banker's child and that the gap between what those toys cost to make and what they cost to buy was a problem worth solving he was right that sturdiness mattered that play value mattered that a toy should be able to survive a child the model he built high volume low margin wide distribution relentless value is the model that walmart would later use to reshape american retail it is the model that amazon would use to reshape american commerce neither of them invented it they inherited it from a generation of american manufacturers who understood before the business schools caught up that the real competitive advantage was not the product it was the system that delivered the product louis marx understood that in 1922 he just never got credit for it he was wrong about one thing one thing only but it was the thing that mattered most he did not understand that in a world mediated by television desire is a manufactured product and that the company that manufactures desire owns the customer regardless of who makes the better toy mattel did not beat marx by making better toys mattel beat marx by making children want their toys before those children ever held them by the time a child stood in the aisle at sears the decision was already made made on the couch on saturday morning in 30 seconds of carefully constructed longing marx never learned to manufacture longing his six principles for a great toy familiarity surprise skill play value comprehensibility sturdiness were the principles of a man who believed that the object spoke for itself in the world he built his business in that was true in the world that replaced it it was not and when he left there was no one who understood the new world well enough to build a bridge between what marx had been and what it needed to become that is the real loss not the factory not the jobs not even the toys though the toys were genuinely great and the people who made them were genuinely proud of making them the real loss is the gap between what marx could have been with different leadership at the critical moment 1965 1968 1972 take your pick and what it became instead a footnote a collector's category a question on a trivia card that most people get wrong somewhere in america there is a sealed fort apache playset sitting in a box in an attic original issue the artwork on the box shows the cavalry and the fort and the wide open west in the colors that the 1950s believed the west had looked like nobody has opened it the plastic figures are still on their sprues inside the instruction sheet is still folded the way it was folded at the glendale plant on a line that ran three shifts a day in a building that used to make airplanes the factory is gone the company is gone the man who built it is gone but the toy is still there sturdy exactly as advertised that is what louis marx left behind