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Aristo-Craft
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B: Another familiar hobby name is Bernie Paul. How did Bernie start?
N: Well, Bernie is an interesting person. He started after all of us. Actually, he started as a kid in the back of his mother's candy store selling model airplane stuff. When the war came along, he owed me about $3,000 which at that time was a tremendous amount of money, and I thought he was going to be drafted. He was put into 4F because he had an ear defect, so we were saved by the bell. Bernie started to distribute goods. Then, he slowly moved out into bigger and bigger places and became a distributor, and after a while started AHM, Associated Hobby Manufacturers. If you have a few minutes, I will tell how all that happened, and I'll tell you how Aristo-Craft came into being, as well as Associated Hobby Manufacturers.
Some of the manufacturers in the hobby industry decided that they were going to kill the importers and get them out of the H.I.A. association. So, they passed a ruling that anybody that exhibited in a trade show would have to pay $300 for each and every brand line they showed. You understand what I'm saying?
B: Yes, big bucks.
N: We had everything packaged over in Japan and Europe. All packaged under the Aristo-Craft trade name, and Bernie put it under Associated Hobby Manufacturers name. That's how those names came into being, because we couldn't pay $300 per line, since we each had 40 or 50 lines. So, if you pay $300 per line, you're out of business.
B: Aristo-Craft became your trade name?
N: That's right and it has continued to this day.
B: It's kind of a neat name. Where did you get the name?
N: Well, we called it Aristo-Craft distinctive miniatures, although we don't use Distinctive Miniatures much today. We used to be good at coming up with names.
B: Why did the hobby trade organization put the $300 rule into effect?
N: They did that to hurt the importers, to put them out of competition with the domestic people. There were a couple of wild guys that thought this was one way to get rid of the importers from the trade show. Then, the buyers wouldn't see the imported goods.
B: The same thing happened in the TMA ( Toy Manufacturers of America). Didn't they have two different shows?
N: Right. The import show was in the Breslin Hotel. I used to exhibit there. Before they went international, all the shows, Nuremberg and all, were national shows. Japanese manufacturers at Nuremberg would say to me, "What did you see?", because all the Japanese would show in downtown Nuremberg in a little hotel. They would say, "What did you see? What did you see?" I went to a meeting and said, "Why don't you make this an International show and you would see what they have and you wouldn't have to go asking about what they are showing." So, they did and they made it an International show.
B: Let's jump to another familiar name, Rivarossi, you knew them well?
N: Very well. Rivarossi was Alexander Rossi. They made terrible, terrible HO trains, and I mean terrible, awful, off scale. So, we paid them a visit and what I loved about them, is that they were located in Como, Italy, right on the Swiss border, a very beautiful area. Rossi had a big castle of a house.
The house was so big that during the war, he used to house 300 people from Milano there. We said to Rossi, it doesn't cost any more to make a mold that's fully scale than it is to make one that isn't. They listened carefully and they went ahead and did this. They weren't selling well at first and they said," You guys cost us a lot of money making us change to scale." I said, "Wait a minute, you're going to prosper from all of this and you are going to make a lot of money." Of course, they did when we were handling their trains until Bernie Paul came along and he gave them a million dollar order. So, they called me and they said, " We just can't refuse this," and they wanted to break our agreement. So, I caught a plane and flew over there and I said, "Look, I won't hold you guys back. You know we are friends. If he gave you that big an order I want to benefit from it, so we'll work out a deal that you pay us a commission on everything that Bernie buys for three years. Then, you're on your own." Which is exactly what they did. Then, they grew from there and then, of course, what happened is that Bernie had them making the trains out of plastic more and more. And although the trains were very good, they were fragile.
B: Were their trains die cast in the beginning?
N: Originally they were all die cast. Beautiful detail and so on.
B: I think the first evidence I saw of them was a Hiawatha engine.
N: The first thing we did with them was a docksider like Varney's, but they did it beautifully. They also made a Hiawatha.
B: The Hiawatha, was that die cast?
N: Yes, and they also made an 0-6-0. All of them were made with plans that we sent them.
B: Somewhere along the line, they got involved with Lionel, didn't they?
N: Yes, well I did that. You see what happened, Alan Ginsburg, President of Lionel was trying to jump into HO real fast. I said, Alan you can't do this. You cannot just start making an HO line in one season, there's no way. So I said, what you should do is buy your track from Atlas and you have a complete line of track. Then I said you buy everything from Rivarossi and package it in Lionel boxes. So, that's exactly what they did. They got a full line through Rivarossi.
B: You told Alan Ginsburg, and got Alan involved?
N: Yes, I had a good ear with Alan. He used to be a buyer at Bamberger's. He was a young man and had graduated Harvard with all the honors. He was very bright and worked for Bamberger's, and he used to tell me stories on how he used to go get his Lionel buying done. You know, the guys would sit there and play gags on him because he was still very young at this point. He was only 22. He went to live in East Orange, NJ, so he could be close to Bamberger's where he worked. I liked Ginsburg. Number one, he was very bright. I think eventually I got him on the Board of the Hobby Industry Association. If you ever saw a guy pull fifteen board members together - he was a genius at it.
B: Another company, switching back to Europe again, is Pola.
N: Pola was a guy by the name of, would you believe, Pollack?
B: Where were they located?
N: In Nuremberg, Germany. He used to make very cruddy stuff. Oh my gosh, it was terrible and the packaging was worse then that. You know, we used to buy Pola and we urged him to make better kits and he finally caught on and began to make beautiful kits. And then he got rich enough to have an airplane and a young wife, and two young children. One day, he was flying and crashed. Well, the widow was too young and too frightened to try to continue the company, so she sold it. The man who runs it now is the one who bought it then. That's were Pola came from.
B: Did they make some cars in Standard O for Lionel?
N: I don't think they made anything for Lionel. They were strictly in structure kits and they stayed there. Their building kits were superb. Then again, Bernie Paul got hold of them and made an exclusive deal. The people in the hobby business were all very creative and very energetic and very daring. They took a lot of risks. If you analyze it, you see its exactly what they did.
B: Somebody over there made O gauge cars. Atlas, I guess, brought some in from Yugoslavia.
N: Well, Mehano Technick made some of that stuff in Yugoslavia, but Rivarossi also made kits in O gauge. That's where you saw it. In fact, Atlas finally wound up with them. But, they had trouble moving them.
Earlier, we mentioned Frank Ajello of Hobby-Land. His son Ed Ajello ran a souvenir shop on the Queen Mary. Actually, Ed was named after Ed Miller. They were very good friends.
B: Most of you were very friendly rivals?
N: Yes, we were friendly, we were rivals to a degree, but we were friendly because we all had one calling. We had to be friendly, we were interested in the business. We had to be together and each one did their own thing, and we competed on some occasions, of course, but not in a bitter way. The one goal was to make the whole hobby thing bigger, to make the pie larger, so each slice would be bigger. This is what a lot of people could never understand. They wanted to make their slice bigger and nothing else. You had to work for the whole pie and that's where the Hobby Industry Association came from. That's why it was successful.
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