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Posted March 19th, 2009
March is Toy History Month - brought to you from Chicago, the home of modern toy invention.
As you might surmise, the toy industry has had its fair share of interesting personalities, and behind every successful company and every product there lies a story. You don’t have to be a lunatic to run a toy company, I have often said, but it helps.
One such personality was Marvin Glass, a pint-sized madman genius who founded the legendary Marvin Glass and Associates - the first, biggest, and greatest source of new toys in the history of the world. I don’t know what was in their water or what they were drinking or smoking back in the 60’s down on the first floor of the Alexandria Hotel (with the brothel upstairs). It is hard to explain otherwise the series of spectacularly timeless toys they created. I'm sorry I missed those days.
Marvin Glass was the invention source of Mr. Machine, dozens of hit games such as Rock em Sockem Robots, Mousetrap, Operation, Simon, classis toys and novelties such as Chatty Cathy, Rubber Vomit, Giant Sunglasses, and countless more. Entire websites are devoted to this history.
One of our first offices was in Chicago on Sunnyside at Ravenswood, sandwiched between the IC and the EL tracks. Love the name of that street. It conjures up happiness still. Our next door office neighbor and soon to become good friend Warren Landsman introduced himself on the day we moved in, and to my astonishment I learned that he was Marvin Glass’s next door neighbor in Evanston.
Warren was himself a war hero. He had tracked Rommel in the deserts of N. Africa on a modified Harley Davidson bike and single handedly brought in ninety Italian soldiers who had just had more than enough of this darn war and were ready for three squares a day in an American prisoner of war camp.
The stories of Marvin’s eccentricities are legend, and Warren could vouch for some of them firsthand. His second floor windows looked down onto Marvin’s backyard, the renowned location for Bacchanalian parties that have sadly gone out of fashion.
And each toy has its own story as well.
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