Flashback 1997: In toyland, it's not all games

           

    I can't believe I've never posted this before. Of all the factory visits I've made in this city, Strombecker is among my favorites. That "grime-darkened wood barrel" I saw there lives in my memory — it was like something you expected hardtack to be store in aboard a clipper ship crossing the Atlantic in 1850. And yes, I only went because I loved their little cars as a child — and yes, the one above is mine.  In 2004, Strombecker was purchased by Processed Plastics Inc., a struggling Alabama toymaker, which closed down the Chicago plant in 2005. 
    

     The Strombecker Corp. didn't have a hit toy this season. No Tickle Me Elmo, no Beanie Babies, no Sing & Snore Ernie. It didn't have a hit toy last season, either, or the season before that.

     In fact, the West Side toy company has never had a fad toy sensation: no Hula-Hoops, no Slinkies, no Monopoly. Not in its 121-year history.
     Still, Strombecker thrives, relying on the old standbys, the year-in, year-out building blocks of childhood — in some cases literally building blocks, with painted, natural wood and alphabet sets. Plus metal cars, bubble pipes, paddle balls, plastic farm animals, tea sets, army men, cap pistols and some 700 other varieties of common toys, mostly sold under its Tootsietoy brand, none of which has caused a riot at Toys R Us, at least not yet.
     In fact, the toy being manufactured one day earlier this month at Strombecker's Pulaski Road plant (it has another factory on Lake Street, three others in the United States and a Canadian plant) isn't even sold at Toys R Us. It's a gun — a Pony Boy Western-style six-shooter — and guns were kicked off the retail giant's shelves in 1994.
     The area where the guns are being cast has a high school shop class smell, oily and metallic. The guns are made of zinc alloy, which arrives in long, heavy ingots that are melted down and injected into molds, each mold making all the pieces needed to produce a pistol, the pieces held together by trees, like a model car fresh from the box. Strombecker also makes the rolls of red caps that go in the guns.
     Production is very low tech. One gun at a time. The mold opens, a worker uses pliers to grab the hot, flat tree of connected gun parts, hangs it on an overhead conveyor chain and greases the mold for the next injection.
     The six-shooter components spend 20 minutes cooling before another worker plucks them off, cuts the pieces apart with a press, triggers falling one way, left and right halves another.
     The raw pieces are tumbled to wear off sharp edges. The small tumbler used for trigger pieces is practically an antique: a grime-darkened wood barrel mounted on a spinning mechanism.
     The finished components, collected in green bins, are assembled by hand in the next room. Lula Williams, who has worked at Strombecker for 23 years, can put together the eight pieces that make up a Pony Boy pistol in less than 30 seconds, or about 130 an hour. Is there an interesting aspect to the job?
     "No, not really," she says.
     The guns are a reminder that the toy business is not all fun. Toys are a luxury item that rise and fall on public whim. The Toys R Us gun banishment is typical of the kind of problem that can crop up out of nowhere. A child molester in Australia called himself Mr. Bubbles; the scandal hurt sales of Strombecker's bubble liquid, which by unhappy coincidence is sold under the Mr. Bubbles brand name.
     Or F. W. Woolworth's. The chain's failure was more than an exercise in nostalgia for Strombecker; once Woolworth's was Strombecker's biggest customer.
     "We're not getting much business from them anymore," said Dan Shure, CEO and president of the company and the fourth generation in his family to run it.
     In addition to the occasional freak disaster, the market has grown tighter in many ways. For instance, the days when Detroit automakers paid to produce the dies to make Tootsietoy cars in their model lines — as a form of promotion — are long gone.
     To help make ends meet, the company moved its metal car production to China, where labor costs $3 a day, compared with $10 an hour on the West Side.
     Adaptability has gotten Strombecker to where it is today, selling $50 million worth of toys annually. Strombecker began in 1876 as the National Laundry Journal, a magazine for the commercial laundries.
     Impressed by the possibilities of a Linotype machine displayed at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, the owners of the Journal bought one, figuring that if the machine could mold letters of type, it could also make little toys to give away as premiums to draw children, and their parents, into laundries.
     The first giveaway toy was, appropriately, a metal flatiron, later joined by a top hat, a Scottie dog, a shoe, a battleship and a race car.
     Sound familiar? By an odd twist of history, that original flatiron and other early metal toys can be seen, to this day, in every Monopoly set, since Charles Darrow, the inventor of Monopoly, used the laundry freebies as tokens when he created his game during the Depression.
     By then, the company was packaging the little toys, selling them in cigar shops and magazine stands.
     In 1898, it teamed up with a Chicago classic, Cracker Jack, and provided the free surprise inside boxes of Cracker Jack for more than half a century.
     At the Lake Street plant, seven workers cut and package jump ropes, while nearby is the production line spewing out liquid bubbles — Strombecker is the largest producer of bubble fluid in the world, 30,000 gallons a day to be blown into bubbles by children in 60 countries.
     The bubbles flowing into colorful plastic bottles on the West Side in December will find themselves floating above children's heads from Seattle to Singapore.
     "I travel around the world," Shure said. "It's a nice feeling to be in a shop in Zimbabwe and see a bottle of our bubbles."
       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 25, 1997