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Aristo-Craft
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B: Another name comes to mind, and that's Robert Wolf. Was he a buyer?
N: Wolf was the original toy buyer for Bamberger's, and then he became Macy's toy buyer. Wolf was the buyer for Bamberger's when we first started the Bamberger Aero Club there. He was an energetic young buyer at that time. Eventually, when Macy's absorbed Bamberger's, he became the buyer for Macy's.
B: Wolf became President and CEO of Lionel Corp., from 1964-68. Ron Antonelli will have an interesting piece on Robert Wolf and the role he played in the Lionel story in an upcoming issue of the Quarterly.
Was John Tyler the owner of Mantua Metal Products?
N: Yes, John Tyler was the founder of Mantua.
B: Was Thomas Industries involved with them when they started?
N: Thomas was not involved with them. Thomas was making some kind of a casting set. I believe Thomas was John Tyler's brother-in-law. He made a small line of O gauge trains. No connection with Tyler. They might have manufactured things for each other. Eventually, I got John Tyler friendly with Steve Schaffan of Atlas, and the three of us used to go out in New York every Thursday. John would come by bus to New York and we would spend the day together, and have dinner, and then we would put John on the bus back to Mantua, NJ.
B: You had fun too, Nat?
N: Oh, we did indeed. It was a tremendously friendly type of industry. There was camaraderie and it was really partially social, because we all worked so darn hard we didn't have time for a family social life, so we had our social activities within the industry.
B: Irv Athearn, how did he get into the model railroad business?
N: Irv was in California, he was way out in the "boonies". In those days, California was where Varney was. California used to be what you call "retirement country." A fireman could retire out there and go into an apartment or house. The house came with linen and furniture and dishes and silverware. You couldn't get any manufacturing sub-contracting done out there. You couldn't get any train merchandise in California.
I told Varney to move out of there. I used to tell him you have got to move out of there. So he moved to Chicago, and of course, immediately he was able to get his sub-contracting die casting done and he made the HO 0-4-0 dockside kit that sold like crazy. He went on from there and became big enough to be a major source of growth of HO.
B: Irv Athearn stayed in California?
N: Irv was a clever manufacturer. He was a hard worker. He was like many other people, such as, Augie Kniff. He did everything by himself "in house".
B: Who is Augie Kniff?
N: Augie Kniff was Tru-Scale He was a friend to everybody in the industry. He first made wood HO roadbed. He made the most beautiful roadbed.
Ron Morris: Nat, along with Tru-Scale roadbed, we came across architectural buildings that appeared they were out of Tru-Scale Manufacturing?
N: Augie did that. He made a coal hopper and a few other structures.
Ron: These are buildings, like houses, not railroad oriented.
N: Augie bought the best wood working machinery and with that machinery he could make anything in wood. He made some buildings. Now, I don't know who the heck he made them for, but they had a similar name.
B: Perhaps they were Yank, Lionel had those on their layout. Nat, we hear so many interpretations of what happened in the early 1960's to toy trains. What really caused the slow-down of toy trains?
N: The demise of toy trains came when everybody began to chase the $19.95 or $24.95 starter sets of trains from Sears and Montgomery Ward. In other words, the manufacturers all thought that the starter sets had to sell for $19.95 or $24.95, and they couldn't come up with any kind of quality at that price, so things got worse and worse quality wise. People had bad quality experiences with them. Even the small storekeepers had bad experiences with them. You know it all culminated in that Scout set. The Scout set was the final ruination of all the cheap, cheap catalog sets that we all, sadly, had to have.
B: So, the cheapening of the line was one of the causes of it?
N: Cheapening the line was basically what happened. Philadelphia used to be the biggest market for toy trains in the country, because they had more one family homes and more attics. In those days, people didn't run trains in the basement. They ran them in the attic because the basements were too wet. Everything used to rust. We wound up using brass track later on. They used attics, so of course, when it came summertime and the golf season started, you couldn't breathe in the attic because of the heat. Nobody played with trains during the summer. Air conditioning was not available at a reasonable price. And what happened was that apartments with small rooms were being built by the millions. Men were coming back from the war and got apartments, small units. Then you didn't have room for the big trains, so HO scale started to mushroom. And Lionel and A.C. Gilbert were not in that ballgame, and by the time they got in it, it was a little late.
B: Gilbert was in HO before World War II.
N: Yes, Gilbert had HO, in fact, I remember that Bill Perry (of A.C. Gilbert) got so mad at me because they had an AC locomotive in HO. They made it because Knapp Electric had one. So what I did, I didn't buy the Gilbert transformer. I went and bought the inexpensive Marx transformer and I put the two together and ran large ads. I tell you, Bill Perry could have killed me. He was really upset because he never had anybody use their engine with Marx transformers to come up with a great price.
B: You know, going back to the demise, the slowdown of trains, I guess we're talking in the 1960's, late fifties and sixties. I've seen it written that the model race cars - slot model motoring killed toy trains.
N: I'll tell you what happened, it really wasn't so. At that time, the Toy Manufacturers Association had a woman as President, and she said kids don't ride in trains, they ride in cars, and the whole thing of racing had gone crazy in popularity. She was so wrong it wasn't even funny. When the smoke cleared, there was the train hobby stronger than ever.
B: You folks, Polk's Hobbies, had a race track?
N: Well, yes, we were the first ones to have the gas engines power the cars to run on rail tracks outdoors. And we always said if we could electrify them, and bring them into the house, it would be the biggest hobby in the world. And sure enough, we found Freddy Francis in England, who made a car called Scalextric, which you pulled back on a spring and you let go and it went forward. We got him interested in making this electrical racing slot car. We couldn't afford to use brass or plastic, so we made the roadbed out of rubber. We imported those slot sets, we would fly them in by British Air, that's how "hot" they were. We got Bobby Coogan, Jackie Coogan's brother, who was a racing nut, to come and do the layout for us and pose for all the pictures. And we took off with slot racing, you couldn't believe it. It became Scalextric, and a few years later, our partner, Freddie Francis, sold out without advising us to the Lines Brothers. Graemme Lines said,' I know you are involved in this thing and I'm going to give you three years exclusively on your own in America,' which he did. He was a gentleman. Well, I tell you, we built that slot business, the whole slot racing industry became a billion dollar business. Everybody made slot racing things. Of course, we couldn't cash in on it, unfortunately, but what the heck, that's the way it is. Anyway, we did do very well. But, of course, it died at the same fast rate that it lived and that was unfortunate, because right in the middle of it came those racing parlors, you know, the commercial racing stores.
B: You put a quarter in to race a car for a few minutes of play.
N: Not a quarter, you paid a dollar minimum. For an hour, they would charge you a $1.50 to $2.50.
B: In the 1960's, in California, they had one or two in every town.
N: They had them in Jersey City, NJ. What happened was the promoters would promise the world, they were "suede shoe guys" that sold slot racing track stores, and they couldn't care less whether they continued or not, so they sold them to everybody. We had doctors investing in them, and so I said, listen, we can't support that many race centers. And, all of a sudden, a man would find out that his son was spending more in the raceway than he was spending on his bowling league. Unfortunately, the buyer of toys, when they heard of the demise of Racing Centers said, the racing business was finished. No, the home sets were not finished, the kids still loved them. What happened was the toy buyers stopped buying the home sets and accessories thereby killing a tremendously good industry. Home racing sets are still around and selling. Scalextric sells very well in England to this day. And you know Carrera in Germany is selling very well all over Europe.
B: Scalextric, were they tied with Lionel?
N: Yes, well I did that. We were the agents for Scalextric. I just told you what happened there. They practically sold it out from under us since we had it three years alone. We told Alan Ginsburg, President of Lionel, look, this is how you get into this and that's exactly what they did The same with Rivarossi, I said you keep selling Scalextric until you make your own line, which they did. They also got into HO with Rivarossi (for which we were the agents) as a starter for HO.
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