What Happened to Tonka? The Steel Toy Trucks Every Boy Remembers — Short Documentary

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Somewhere in your memory there is a yellow dump truck. Maybe it lived in a sandbox. Maybe it sat in the dirt next to the garage, or under the Christmas tree with a bow on the cab. You loaded it with gravel. You rolled it off the porch steps. Maybe your little brother stood on it just to see what would happen, and it did not break. That truck was built by real people in a small town on the edge of a lake in Minnesota. Hundreds of them. Most were never thanked by name. And one fall day in 1982, those people learned that their work was about to leave town for good. So how does a company that made the toughest toy in America end up losing its factory, its town, and finally its independence? The answer is stranger than you might think. And it starts in an old schoolhouse. It is 1946. The war is over, and men are coming home looking for something to build. In Mound, Minnesota, a small town about 20 miles west of Minneapolis, three partners start a little metal company. Their names are Lynn Everett Baker, Avery Crounce, and Alvin Tesh. They set up shop in an old schoolhouse and call the business Mound Metalcraft. Their plan has nothing to do with toys. They want to make garden tools and tie racks. Practical things. Things a returning veteran might buy for his new house. But the building came with a strange inheritance. The previous occupant, a company called Streeter, had designed and patented a couple of metal toys. A steam shovel and a crane. E.C. Streeter was not interested in the toy business. So, he offered the designs to the three men from Mound Metalcraft. They figured toys might make a nice little sideline. They had no idea. Those first toys had humble roots. A former Tonka employee from Mound later recalled that the early Streeter design had been put together using the wooden bottoms of ammunition boxes and recycled meat cans. The old schoolhouse itself had once been used to make ammunition boxes. Now, it was about to make something very different. Alvin Tesh, the metal man of the group, reworked the designs. And Lynn Baker made a decision that would shape everything that followed. He believed there was no future in wooden toys. If they were going to do this, the toys would be made of metal. At first, it was a tiny operation. Just six workers assembling two models. A steam shovel and a crane. Each part of the old schoolhouse had its own job. One room for stamping the metal. One for painting. One for storing tools. One for putting it all together. Kids who had once sat at desks in that building were now buying what came out of it. In 1947, the partners took their toys to the New York Toy Fair. That first year, Mound Metalcraft sold about 37,000 of those toy steam shovels and cranes. The garden tools never stood a chance. Before long, the company dropped them completely and went all in on toys. But success brought its first hard choice. In 1952, the state of Tennessee came calling with an offer. Move the factory south and enjoy lower taxes and cheaper operations. It was a tempting deal. Two of the founders, Avery Crounce and Alvin Tesh, wanted to take it. The board of directors said no. Tonka would stay in Mound. Crounce and Tesh walked away from the company they had helped create. A few years later, Lynn Baker's health began to fail. And he too stepped back, leaving the company for good in 1961. All three of the men from the schoolhouse were gone. Keep that offer from Tennessee in mind. Because 30 years later, the same question would come back. And this time, the answer would be very different. Now, they needed a name. They looked out at the big lake next door, Lake Minnetonka. The word Tonka comes from the Dakota language, from a word that means great or big. And that is exactly what they wanted their trucks to be. The first logo showed the name in red above blue waves, with three birds flying overhead. Many say those three birds were a quiet nod to the three men who started it all. In November of 1955, Mound Metalcraft officially became Tonka Toys Incorporated. By then, the company had outgrown the old schoolhouse. Tonka moved into a new factory along the shore of Lake Minnetonka. And over the years, that building kept growing, one addition after another. That same year, a young man named Lloyd Laumann graduated from Waconia High School and went to work on the Tonka assembly line. Decades later, he would become one of the biggest contributors to a local collection of classic Tonka trucks: fire trucks, cement mixers, all of it. When a man spends his working life building something, he does not easily let it go. So what made a Tonka different from every other toy truck in the store? Steel. While other companies were turning to cheaper materials, Tonka built its trucks from heavy, automobile-gauge-pressed steel. The goal was simple: make small-scale versions of the trucks a little boy might see rolling past his house every day. They looked like the real machines on Main Street and in the gravel pits. Tonka added a pickup truck in 1955 and a jeep in 1962, always following what was happening on real American roads. Dump trucks, graters, cranes, moving vans, pickup trucks, jeeps. Kids did not play with a Tonka gently. They played with it hard. And the trucks were made for exactly that. Here is a little detail collectors love. On some early Tonka trucks, you can find a number painted on the hood: GR2-2431. It is said to be the company's own telephone number in Minnesota. There really was a Greenwood Exchange in that area. A toy company that put its own phone number on its products. That tells you something about the kind of small-town pride inside that factory. And who was building these trucks? Old photographs from the mound assembly line show rows of women putting the finishing touches on graders, jeeps, and moving vans. This was steady work in a small town. Neighbors working next to neighbors. People who could look at a Christmas catalog and point to something they had made with their own hands. Those were the golden years. Between 1955 and 1960, Tonka's sales tripled. In 1961, the company went public. In 1963 came the Mini Tonka, a smaller and cheaper truck for smaller wallets. And in the middle of the 1960s, Tonka added the Mighty Tonka line, the big jumbo trucks that so many of you will remember. At the front of that line was one truck in particular. Big, bright yellow with a dump bed you could fill with half the sandbox. The Mighty Dump Truck. It went on to become the best-selling toy Tonka ever made. And it stayed that way for the rest of the century. If there is one Tonka you can picture right now, it is probably that one. Then came the numbers that sound almost impossible today. A survey in 1966 found that 85% of American households with children owned a Tonka toy. By 1969, that number was more than 90%. And the average family owned more than five Tonka toys. Think about that. Nine out of ten homes. If you grew up in America in those years, there is a very good chance a Tonka was waiting for you somewhere. The man steering the company through much of this era was Russell Wankstern. And he had not come from Wall Street or some fancy business school. He had been a high school shop teacher. A man who understood tools, metal, and how things are made. But even in the good years, there were warning signs. As the company grew, management added layer after layer. In 1968, Tonka moved its headquarters from Mound to Minneapolis, putting real distance between the executives and the factory floor. Soon after, delays in tools and dyes stalled production. The plant had to run enormous amounts of overtime to catch up. And the company's earnings dropped by 35% in a single year. Wankstern took control, cut the waste, and brought things back down to earth. And for a while, it worked. By the middle of the 1970s, Tonka's yearly sales had passed $100 million. The company had facilities in eight countries. And the plant in Mound employed more than 2,000 people. It was still the beating heart of the whole operation. 2,000 people. In a town that small, almost everyone knew someone who worked at Tonka. A mother, an uncle, a neighbor down the street. But the trucks would only be built in the factory by the lake for a few more years. By the 1970s, the toy world was changing fast. Store shelves were filling up with cheaper and flashier vehicles, many of them made of plastic. Tonka's share of the toy truck market began to slip. The company tried to fight back by throwing more and more at the wall. In 1978 alone, Tonka introduced 70 new products. But getting so many new toys right on the factory floor was hard. Production costs climbed, and the company slipped into the red. In 1979, a new management team took over. Led by a 40-year-old executive named Steven Shank. He had a very different idea of where Tonka trucks should be made. The company started looking south. In March of 1982, Tonka opened a plant in Juarez, Mexico. Then, on October 10, 1982, the announcement came. The factory in Mound would close. About 614 production workers would lose their jobs, along with roughly 35 office workers. A University of Minnesota study looked closely at who those people were. The average worker was 51 years old. The average worker had 19 years at the company. And most of them were women. 19 years. These were not temporary hands. These were people who had built the trucks your kids and grandkids played with. So, why leave? The jobs were not disappearing. They were moving to a brand new plant in El Paso, Texas. The old Mound building had grown piece by piece over the years, with multiple floors and add-ons that made moving materials slow and costly. The new Texas plant sat on a single floor. Taxes were lower. California, one of Tonka's biggest markets, was closer. But the biggest reason was simple. In Mound, an assembly worker earned about $8.45 an hour. In El Paso, the same job paid about $4.15. Remember Tennessee? Back in 1952, Tonka's board had turned down lower taxes and cheaper costs in the South, and two founders walked out over it. Now, three decades later, the company was making almost exactly that move. Only this time, nobody was there to say no. In December of 1983, the doors in Mound closed for the last time. Tonka did offer severance pay and some help with retraining. Local leaders formed a committee to help the workers find new jobs. But a year after the shutdown, researchers estimated that at least one in four of those workers was still unemployed, possibly as many as half. And many of those who did find work earned far less than before. The giant building, around half a million square feet, was sold off and turned into space for other businesses. The sound of steel being pressed into toy trucks was gone from Mound. Now you might think that was the end of the story. It was not. Because the strangest chapter was still ahead. After the move, Tonka had a surprise hit. In 1983, the company launched GoBots, small robots that turned into cars and planes. Sales came close to $100 million. Then, in 1985, came Pound Puppies, the soft little dogs that kids could adopt. For a while, Pound Puppies brought in more than half of the company's profits. But toy fads fade fast. By 1987, Pound Puppies had cooled off, and Tonka's profits fell hard. So, the company made a giant gamble. It bought Kenner Parker Toys, the home of Monopoly, Clue, Play-Doh, Nerf, and the famous Kenner action figures. The price was more than half a billion dollars. And Tonka borrowed nearly every cent of it. For a moment, the little company from the schoolhouse in Mound became the third largest toy maker in the United States. Then, the bills came due. The debt was enormous. And when the economy turned at the end of the 1980s, Tonka could not keep up. In 1990, the company lost more than $10 million. In 1991, Tonka was sold to its rival, Hasbro, for roughly $486 million. That was less than Tonka itself had paid for Kenner Parker only four years earlier. Within days of the deal closing, Hasbro announced that the remaining 242 Tonka employees in Minnesota would be laid off or transferred by the end of the year. The headquarters moved to Rhode Island. After 45 years, Tonka was no longer a Minnesota company. The name lives on. In 2001, Tonka trucks were inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame. By then, the trucks themselves had changed too. Starting in the 1980s, more and more plastic found its way into the line. And some of the trucks made for the youngest kids ended up almost entirely plastic. Collectors will tell you the difference the moment they pick one up. Today, the brand is still owned by Hasbro and made under license by other companies. You can still walk into a store and buy a yellow Tonka dump truck. But it is not the same story. The trucks are no longer built by neighbors in a small town by the lake. And the people who once made them are a part of history that is easy to forget. In Mound, the local historical society keeps a display about the company that put their town on the map. And somewhere out there, in attics and garages and grandkids' toy boxes, those old steel trucks are still rolling. Scratched, faded, still not broken. Which is more than anyone can say for the factory that made them. Do you still have your old Tonka? Tell me in the comments which one you had and what you did with it. And if you enjoy stories about the factories and the people who built the things we grew up with, please subscribe to The Last Shift and turn on notifications so you never miss the next story. Thanks for watching.