Word: toye
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...owned a small drygoods store and left most of the job of raising young Louis to a German maid. By the time Louis reached P.S. 11, he was known derisively as "The Dutchman." Marx still speaks with a guttural rasp and nurses a distrust for German. On annual toy trips to Germany, Marx hires an interpreter, although, as he admits, "I understand like...
...become a $5,000-a-year man." After a short-lived job with a druggists' syndicate, Marx stumbled "by sheer happenstance" into an office-boy's job with Ferdinand Strauss, whose Zippo the Climbing Monkey and Alabama Coon Jigger (a clockwork minstrel) were the first mechanical toys mass-manufactured in the U.S. Within four years, Marx had been promoted to manage the company's East Rutherford, NJ. plant, and soon afterward he had his first idea for a toy. One of Strauss's products was a toy horn that bleated "Mamma, Papa." Marx amplified the sound effects, redesigned the horn...
...next job, as salesman for a Vermont wood-products company, Marx redesigned a line of wooden toys, and sales soared from 15,000 to 1,500,000 in two years. At the same time, Louis and brother Dave set themselves up as middlemen. Their specialty was to figure out how to cut costs on a 10 toy. Then they would land an order, farm out the manufacturing and pocket the profit. Before he was 21, Lou Marx had served a hitch in the Army, risen from private to sergeant, and, back in civilian clothes, realized his ambition of making...
...brothers Louis and Dave started in to make toys themselves. They bought the dies for Zippo and the Coon Jigger after Strauss had gone bankrupt. The monkey and the minstrel had been on the market for more than 20 years, but Marx gave them bright new colors, brought out bigger models, and sold 8,000,000 of each. By the time he was 26, Marx was a millionaire and convinced that, in the toy industry, there is nothing new under the sun. To prove his point, he brought Zippo back this year, redesigned, rechristened (Jocko) and repriced...
Hard-driving Louis and easygoing brother Dave (known to friends as "Mako" and "Spendo") now have six U.S. factories, wholly owned British and Canadian subsidiaries, and toy-manufacturing interests in Germany, France, Mexico, South Africa, Japan, Australia, and Brazil. Peak U.S. employment...