|
Aristo-Craft
Trains Internet Depot |
B: Getting back to Lionel. They were interested in just selling to the big stores?
N: There was a total division which came about peculiarly. The Italian faction ran the factory and design, while the Jewish faction ran the sales office. Lionel was fighting for more volume and to get the biggest space in the catalogs, in other words, Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward were the kings you know, and whoever got the most space in there did the most business. Everybody else came second. Department stores were the thing for them because during Christmas time that was their big showcase. However, the national GE Hardware chain was not being overlooked.
B: Was Raphael the sales manager then?
N: At that time yes.
B: Tell us something about the Lionel legend at that time.
N: It was indeed a legend during those years all travel and transportation relied on railroads. Steam locos pulled the passenger and freight trains. The distant whistle of the trains lived in the minds of everyone, young and old, with a promise of travel and adventure. Lionel was the link from fantasy to the closest promise of reality.
B: Who did you deal with at Gilbert?
N: At Gilbert I dealt with Bill Perry at the New York Showroom. But I didn't actually deal with Perry because I dealt with A.C. Gilbert himself, since he always wanted to talk to us. He would say, "Come on up, I'll pay your car fare." "You don't have to pay for my car fare. I'll come up to New Haven anytime to talk." Then whatever orders we had to place we worked with Perry.
B: Bill Perry was a nice fellow, wasn't he?
N: Perry was a typical New Englander, although he spent his life in New York. He was a nice man and kind of had his soft sell way. He always talked to me when things were rough to absorb how the hobby business was doing. He always stood there very tall and dignified. He commanded respect.
B: As a young kid I remember the Gilbert salesmen in tweed jackets, more subdued than the Lionel salesmen.
N: To a degree, they were like the British. I don't know where they got that thing, but they had those leather elbow jackets and a pipe.
B: Another hobby personality in New York that was interesting, who was an early pioneer if you want to use that word, was International Models. Did you know those fellows?
N: Yes, I knew Lou Barnett. He was a CPA by profession and the accountant for Ideal Model Airplane Co., one of the earliest model airplane companies in the business. He became very interested in the hobby business, especially when things began to arrive from the Orient. So he stopped being an accountant and traveled to Japan. He traveled by boat and it would take him a month to get there. He started to buy all the various gadgets that were available at the time which were really very clever. But they were not really quality goods. They were interesting because they used a lot of brass which nobody had used yet. And he became very involved in the hobby and started International Models.
B: They had a store when I first knew them, up near the old Madison Square Garden on 7th Ave.
N: That's right. Then they moved down to Union Square.
B: He had an awful lot of goods, but never the quality that Polk's had.
N: In the first place, mechanically he was very dull, but he loved the way they treated him when he went over to Japan. He used to say the suppliers would be there waiting at the boat so nobody else got a hold of him. Really, in those days Japan needed the business.
B: He brought in grain of wheat bulbs, signals, etc. didn't he?
N: Yes, and he did the dry ice engines for the model airplanes, and in those days outside of rubber bands we had what you call compressed air engines. We had a long 36" tube inside the fuselage which you blew up at the gas station. And then you would let go and the engine would operate by air pressure. Instead of that, the Japanese made a dry ice one and put dry ice in the tube, and as it melted the ice created a gas and the gas pressure ran the engine.
B: In addition to being an early importer of all those miniature lights, signals, and HO brass engines, he had a tinplate O gauge line which he called Scaleplate.
N: He told me once that the Japanese were very hungry for business in those days. He used to carry a little mirror in his vest pocket which had "Betty Boop" on the back of it. Well, Betty Boop was very popular. He said while he was working there he bent over and it fell out of his pocket and was left there. By the time he got home they already had 20 samples for him of the Betty Boop mirror.
B: I used to go in his office and he had a big chalk board, which had all the names of the different ships from the Orient and their arrival dates. The last thing I remember about them, they were bringing in Lone Star from England, which became N gauge.
N: oh, yes. That didn't do well, even in England. you know.
B: When did you folks go to the Orient, or did they come to you?
N: No, we went to the Orient. We were one of the early starters. We went after Lou Barnett, because we were looking for specific things that we had designed. Lou took whatever they had for him. He wasn't trained enough in mechanics or in the hobby field to come up with an item of his own. He would wait for them to make something and show it to him, and then he would either buy it or not.
B. You and your brother were a team, but Barnett's son didn't seem interested.
N: He had two sons, neither one was adventuresome. Second, I don't think they even liked the business. They had their noses in the air with it. I know they were not rich enough to be eccentric, so I don't know where they came off doing that.
B: You took things over to the Orient that you wanted them to make for you?
N: That's right. We had electric motors in mind and we had many other things in mind. Not necessarily or specifically for the hobby trade. But we tried multiple use things, and we would design them here and then go to have them made.
B: Your brother was involved with the motors?
N: He met Ken Mabuchi, a young man making motors with workers sitting on the ground. But he saw a spark in this man so we went with him, and then we built that business up in this country tremendously.
B: They are still in business, aren't they?
N: Gosh, they are the biggest manufacturers of fractional horsepower DC motors in the world. They are the ones that supply all the motors for this cordless stuff. You take your automobile, and I'll bet you nine out of ten items that operate electrically, such as your mirror, power windows, etc., are made by Mabuchi Motors. Your windshield wipers, your water squirter, they're all done with Mabuchi motors.
B: And they still do things for the toy hobby?
N: Oh, yes, they have not let go of that business at all.
B: Another name you mentioned was Ideal. They were on 18th St. in New York.
N: Yes, that was Dave Newmark. They started in airplanes, towards the end, they were the ones that made the cardboard buildings for Gilbert HO. They could do a lot of things, but the problem with them was they never wanted to move out of 18th St. in New York City, and go out to the Island or Jersey, where they could have a decent factory. Everything was tough there. You had to go up in the elevator ten floors or something and unload. Everything was hard. Money backer of Ideal was a man by the name of Kramer. He was also an engineer. He worked with them, but he never wanted to move out of New York. So eventually, they just lost out on cost.
B: Is that the Kramer that we know later on in the hobby?
N: No, Ideal's Kramer was involved in the hobby business. He was strictly a number one financial and number two mechanical man.
B: Another Kramer, Sol, was active in the hobby?
N: There was Sol and Lou Kramer In Baltimore. They used to have Burd Model Airplane Co. and they became Kramer Bros. Hobby Distributors. And now they are Life-Like. The two boys are still together, although, like my brother and I, they are no longer boys.
B: Did you have any connection with Colber?
N: Yes, those two men were in Irvington, NJ, right near Lionel, and they were doing automotive parts when they got interested in model railroading. I gave them a street light built by a firm in Pittsburgh (H&H) who had made it for me, and they looked at it and they said that they could make that thing real easy. So they knocked it off and went into a large range of accessories. They found a nice easy business. They are still in the automotive business. They are still there, but they don't do anything in model railroading. For a while there they were coming along pretty well, with a good accessory line.
B: They were even imitating the Lionel orange boxes.
N: That's right. They were very good. They were good mechanics, they were good engineers, even though eventually they just didn't find the market that was hot enough for them. Automotive was so much bigger.
B: Another hobby person in New York that always intrigued me was Frank Ajello, at Hobby-Land.
N: I don't know why you make such a big thing out of Frank Ajello. Frank was the world's greatest opportunist and the biggest "pitch man" in the world. He was a great guy. I loved the guy. When he went bankrupt I went to the creditors meeting, he cost me a lot of money and Bernie Paul was sitting there and said to the committee, "Well, put this guy out of business, he can't do any good anyway." So I said, "No, you shouldn't put him out of business, he played an important part in the downtown New York City area when we didn't have any kind of good stores." So they said, where is he going to get the merchandise? So me, like the hero, I told the committee that I would supply him with merchandise. I did, and you know what, he never paid me for that either. It was funny, so Bernie said to me, "All right smart man, what did you accomplish?" Anyway, I liked Frank, and he had a nice personality. We were friends, we used to socialize with he and his wife, and Ed Miller and his wife.
B: Ed Miller? What role did he play in the hobby?
N: He used to be a hobby rep, but at one time he had his own line Emco. You know railroad hats and a few other items.
B: They made a little trolley with the name Dinkepuille, didn't they?
N: Yes, they made little trolleys once. Whatever he could get a hold of. He was a rep, he was not a manufacturer.
B: Did he not bring in the Sakai line?
N: Yes, he did. He brought in a few things wherever he could, but he really couldn't. He was not a manufacturer, he was a manufacturer's agent. He had a showroom in the Fifth Avenue Building and he used to rep things. And when he could find something on his own he did. The company that handled his own direct things was called Emco-Ed Miller Company.
B: Another company we would like to know a little more about was Comet Metal or Authenticast.
N: Comet Metal or Authenticast was on Long Island. Their claim to fame was the identification military tanks and planes in HO that were used for training during the war.
B: Did they make some train figures, too?
N: They made figures to go with the tanks and then they made figures for HO and some other figures. None of them very good because they used sludge castings. Eventually their tanks became collector items because nobody could get them. They were difficult to make. They sold them to somebody in Delaware and that company couldn't make them. The Slonim Brothers were the originators of Authenticast.
B: For a while Nat, they were making soldier sets to compete with Britain's.
N: They made the 33MM sets of soldiers, boxed sets, and they couldn't get very far into that business at all. In the first place their castings were rough, and in the second place the painting was not at all comparable to Britain's, the other boxed soldier people. Then they went to Ireland with their business. The Irish Government would offer anybody anything if they would come there and employ some people. So they got a loan and went to Ireland, and they didn't succeed there. Then they went to South Africa. In South Africa they couldn't train the people well enough and the soldiers came out terrible and unacceptable to the market. I put in a bid for the molds for the soldiers and nothing happened. I couldn't figure out where the heck they were and eventually they got lost in the shuffle somewhere.
B: I believe Gilbert used their figures at one time.
N: Yes, because they were handy. They were local and they could deliver. In other words, they weren't great figures, but they used them.
Or select from one of the following: