THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA (19 page)

Erector later became the first important American toy advertised extensively in national magazines. Spending the then staggering sum of twelve thousand dollars for advertising, Gilbert scheduled major space in the fall 1913 issues of
The American Boy, St. Nicholas, Good Housekeeping, Saturday Evening Post, Popular Mechanics,
and other periodicals.

The slogan accompanying these ads became synonymous with Erector for most of the years of its life—“Hello, boys! make lots of toys!” The copy in each ad was strongly personal in tone, reflecting A. C. Gilbert’s great liking and fascination with his plaything. Those who owned his Mysto magic sets remember the excellent tips on stage demeanor in the instruction books—tips that only a veteran magician could have written. In the same way, Gilbert extended his enthusiasm for Erector to his ads and began to publish a promotional newspaper called
Erector Tips.

Erector, Lego, Tinkertoy, and Lincoln Logs share the same bedrock appeal: they all stimulate the creative urges of model builders, young and old.

“People like to do things with their hands,” says Bill Heck at Playskool. “That has something to do with the appeal of Lincoln Logs and other building toys. There is a real reward to artistic completion of a model cabin or trestle—a terrific sense of satisfaction, especially for the child, in completing a piece of work he’s begun. Building toys show kids they can follow directions, and they also stress stick-to-it-ness.”

Howard Sussman at Tinkertoy points out the appeal to the imagination as well as to the hand. “The child usually begins by constructing suggested models in our instruction manual. But after that, he is only limited by the boundaries of his imagination.”

Art Barnett, at Gabriel, notes a paradox in the appeal of Erector. Its abstract appearance gives the toy a distinctive look, yet the components are thoroughly realistic—the actual fastenings that are used in architectural construction. “The fact that the child who builds with Erector is handling real nuts and screws is probably very important,” he feels.

Lego, on the other hand, is especially attractive because of the system’s free-form ability to assemble and disassemble swiftly, which makes it very hard for a child to become bored with the toy. “Furthermore,” asserts Samsonite’s Peter Van-dernoot, “it appeals to many ages of child. Lego stays in the house for a long time.”

Perhaps the basic pleasures of every building toy are best summed up by Barnett, speaking of Erector: “It teaches; it offers a challenge; it gives the user an opportunity to fail or succeed at a goal; it seems to stay in the play area for a long while; and finally, it is a toy which involves the parent to some degree.”

Building toys reflect the deepest instincts of the human being to create form out of chaos—whether as a free shape or as a miniature dwelling structure. Erector, Lego, Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoy, and other building sets encourage children to examine and reproduce the world in which they live.

But more important, these playthings allow the child to dream of other kinds of worlds, those that exist first only in the imagination. With the simple stuff of wooden dowels, plastic bricks, rough-hewn logs, or tiny girders, the aspiring youngster can put forth the first tentative expressions of his will to create.

Jumping Jacks were the most popular toy in France in 1746—until a member of the constabulary decided that pregnant women who saw the toy’s contorted limbs would risk giving birth to misshapen monsters. As a result, the Jumping Jack was banned from sale.

The Jumping Jack was a victim of one of history’s earliest epidemics of toy-safety hysteria. The most recent one began a few years ago in the United States.

Though hazardous toys do exist and must be rooted out, there are also thousands of safe, well-made playthings on the market. Consumer advocates have created a state of emergency where none exists. Innocent companies have been hurt to penalize the guilty. A large segment of the press must be held responsible for the misunderstanding since it exploited every ounce of fright potential in the safety issue while ignoring the toy industry’s attempts to defend itself

Despite its questionable tactics, the safety crusade accomplished three positive results: it made parents more aware of their responsibility in buying toys and supervising play; it enabled passage of the needed Child Protection and Toy Safety Act of 1969; and it spurred the Toy Manufacturers of America to draft and propose for adoption the most stringent toy-making standards in the world.

In general, consumer advocates fulfill a vitally important function in our computerized, impersonal society; even in the toy-safety issue, it can be seen that their efforts produced real benefits. But these results cannot justify the irreparable harm done to many guiltless manufacturers.

I witnessed the progress of the toy-safety campaign from the beginning as a reporter for
Toys and Novelties
(now
Toys)
magazine. It was obvious that consumer spokesmen and the press were distorting the facts; whether for selfaggrandizement, or to call the public’s attention to the subject as dramatically as possible, no one knows. But whatever the motives behind it, the safety crusade soon turned into a large-scale witch-hunt.

Newspapermen, national columnists, and TV feature writers completely overlooked the toy industry’s good safety record, refusing to listen to the manufacturers’ side of the story. Only recently have a few journalists sought to correct the error. An article in the February 1972 issue of
Fortune
stressed the misinformation circulating about toy safety. Citing a California congressman who had proclaimed that toys kill over fifteen thousand children a year, the magazine explained that the statistic actually referred to children’s deaths from
every
possible kind of accident.

However,
Fortune
could not tell how the legislator arrived at this misleading statistic in the first place; few journalists know the story behind it. I do know it, because I was assigned to cover the Washington hearing where the erroneous figure first reached the ears of the press.

It happened on April 16, 1969. Senators Frank E. Moss, of Utah, and Burke Pearson, of Kansas, were conducting a hearing of the Subcommittee for Consumers of the Senate Commerce Committee on S. 1689, a bill which would give the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare the authority to remove from sale any toy deemed hazardous.

The chief proponent of the bill was Arnold B. Elkind, chairman of the National Commission on Product Safety, which had been formed to study and report on various American consumer products. The commission was not due to issue its findings until a year later, but Elkind felt that such a crisis was evident in the toy business that an interim report had to be made to Congress.

But when Elkind spoke that morning, he was also appealing to the Moss subcommittee to appropriate more funds to his commission, which otherwise could not complete its study. This fact was virtually unreported at the time. Could it be that the interim report on the alleged toy-safety crisis was meant to prove the commission’s importance, so it could get the funding it needed?

Present that morning were toy executives from Fisher-Price, Hasbro, Milton Bradley, Gabriel, Remco, Mattel, Ideal, Kenner, Tonka, and Tudor Metal. Elkind spoke first, followed by a representative of the Food and Drug Administration, the agency that would enforce the bill if it were passed. Gabriel’s president, Jerry Fryer, representing the TMA, was to be the final speaker.

The bill Elkind was supporting (and an identical one in the House) sought to update an existing federal law governing toys. Though the press coverage of the morning’s proceedings made the toy industry appear opposed to the new legislation, the TMA actually praised the bill as good and necessary, and asked to be considered one of its sponsors. Parts of the bill, however, seemed loose and undefined to the TMA and could, by implication, be applied against any toy, safe or not. So the TMA was asking for a few rewordings to make the bill easier to enforce.

At the end of the hearing, Senator Moss complimented the TMA for its spirit of cooperation, and expressed his understanding of the need for proper manufacturing guidelines in the body of the bill. And when the Child Protection and Toy Safety Act of 1969 was eventually passed, many of the TMA suggestions were embodied in its language.

However, Arnold Elkind would not discuss any rewording that morning. When he was done speaking, he packed up his papers and left, refusing to hear Jerry Fryer deliver the toy industry’s viewpoint. His departure climaxed a series of actions that the toy manufacturers found objectionable.

For example, that morning Elkind had laid out an array of toys on the table before him while he spoke. It was a “chamber of horrors,” a selection of unsafe playthings he said were then on the market. Photographers crowded around to pop flashbulbs at the assortment, and camera crews from the major TV networks filmed Elkind with his display.

I had arrived early enough to take the seat directly behind Elkind, and had a better view of the toys than most of the other reporters in the room. I could easily see that most were imports from the Orient or were produced by small companies of questionable repute.

Yet when Senator Pearson asked Elkind point-blank whether the offensive toys were made by major manufacturers or “just by garage-type of operation, fly-by-night companies,” the commission chairman dodged the question. He cited only one specific example—a poorly made crib which was made, he said, by the “Tiffany of such manufacturers.” He did not point out the origins of the rest of the flotsam on the table—or that cribs are
not
toys.

The erroneous statistic grew out of the speech Elkind gave that morning, in which he stated that accidents cause the deaths of more than fifteen thousand children a year. This figure included mishaps of all kinds—fires, car crashes, household hazards—but Elkind did not stress the point.

Senator Pearson misunderstood. He asked the speaker whether the fifteen thousand deaths
resulting from unsafe toys
could be further broken down by product type.

And Elkind did not correct the senator.

In spite of audible and angry murmurs behind him, Elkind let the mistake stand, merely remarking that safety statistics were not as detailed as he wished.

Later, Jerry Fryer refuted the statistic but nothing he said was recorded by the press—they were no longer there!

It wasn’t long before the phony statistic of fifteen thousand deaths caused by unsafe toys got into print and on the air. The wire services carried it, and across the nation the rumor spread that American toys were practically dangerous weapons. One West Coast columnist, apparently unaware that the organization was involved with the new safety legislation, savagely attacked the TMA for not taking effective safety action.

Worse was to come. The AFL-CIO came out in support of Elkind’s unrevised safety bill. Elkind gave no reason for disregarding the TMA’s rewording suggestions, even though Senator Moss spoke in favor of the revisions.

As Christmas, 1969, approached, the hysteria in the press mounted; scare stories were splashed across front pages with banner headlines. Still, examples of “name” unsafe toys were noticeably few. In fact, some of the playthings cited as hazardous dated back nearly a decade. One manufacturer attacked in several articles had actually gone out of business a number of years earlier.

Then Ralph Nader entered the fray with an article entitled “Dangers in Toyland” in the November issue of the
Ladies’ Home Journal.
The article, although comparatively mild and reasonable in tone, was little more than a rehash of Elkind’s interim report, and included several flaws.

Predictably enough, the Nader article hurt the Christmas business of toy sellers and manufacturers, both innocent and guilty. Yet when one TMA member tried to point out some of the mistakes in Nader’s article, the
Ladies’ Home Journal
positively refused to print any industry statement. I personally called the
Journal
and asked if a reader could send a letter to the editor correcting certain statements. I was told that the
Journal
does not print letters and that Ralph Nader is not the sort of man to make mistakes. Period.

A similar pre-Christmas attack took place in 1970, ten days before the holiday, when CBS broadcasted a scathing denouncement of American toy firms, again using questionable statistics. Once more, the timing was the most damaging possible to retailers, large and small. But this time, the TMA challenged the network to justify the statistics. CBS thought it over and retracted its editorial—after the Christmas selling season was over.

A new statistic was used by Nader in his article, an astounding figure of seven hundred thousand injuries caused by toys each year. It was later quoted by Elkind in his commission’s final report to Congress and was cited several times in Ed Swartz’s book,
Toys That Don’t Care.

Seven hundred thousand toy-related injuries a year.
The statistic is so staggering that, if true, it would condone almost any tactic the consumer advocates used to make the public safety conscious. The statistic was first released by the U.S. Public Health Service, which appears to give it a most official stamp.

But let’s see just how reliable it is.

The figure comes from an estimate made by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in a 1968 table of consumer-product accidents. The final report of Elkind’s National Commission on Product Safety states the following:

It should be clearly understood that these estimates are not based on actual counts of the whole United States. These estimates have an unknown error attached. Thus, we cannot say how right or wrong we may be . . . the estimates presented have much to be desired.

Then the report has a further disclaimer:

The statistical estimates given are those injuries associated with consumer products and are not necessarily caused by the consumer product. In many injuries there may be a combination of circumstances which result in the injury; thus, no one factor can be called the cause. The present state of the art and available studies limit our knowledge about the precise involvement of a consumer product. In sports, for example, a consumer product is used. The actual injury may not be associated with the product, however.