THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA (20 page)

In other words—as Jerry Fryer told the Senate subcommittee in 1969—there is an accident potential in any toy on the market, no matter how well built.

The HEW projection of seven hundred thousand toy injuries was made on an estimate that toys cause 3.5 percent of all household-object injuries.

But on May 8, 1972, Malcolm W. Jensen, director of the FDA’s Bureau of Product Safety, told me: “I would not put much weight on the seven hundred thousand injuries caused by toys as cited in the 1968 HEW report. It was the best available figure, which means little. In 1968, when the toy-safety bill was being considered, something was needed to attract the attention of Congress. If you don’t show people being hurt, you don’t get a consumer bill passed. So the HEW made accident estimates, and may have estimated high. Naturally, the press went and hurt the toy industry. It’s a lead-pipe approach to achieving legislation, and the people out front get hurt.”

Let’s look at another toy-safety statistic, one virtually ignored by safety advocates.

The FDA recently set up a system for gathering facts about accidents that require hospital attention. Known as NEISS (the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System), it will not release any findings until all of its 119 hospitals are plugged into it, and until the system has functioned for at least a year, learning to interpret its statistics.

However, in 1970, NEISS made one public report before the FDA put the clamps on.* At a meeting of health officials on December 11 of that year, James D. Grant, deputy commissioner of the FDA, made a statement that considerably heartened the American toy industry.

As this book went to press, the NEISS system broke its silence to release new accident statistics on selected product categories. Though not comprehensive, the new figures strongly suggest that toys are indeed among the safest consumer products.

“Out of approximately 125,000 cases reported fin the NEISS system] as of July 1, 1970,” Grant said, “only about 5700 were associated with toys and hobby equipment. Review of the particular toys associated with these injuries indicates that about 77 percent involved wheeled toys such as bicycles, tricycles, roller skates, skate boards, wagons, and scooters. Sleds were associated with 297, or about 5 percent of the injuries in this category. Balls, for 253, or about 4.5 percent.

“Thus, such toys as homemaker toys, dolls, stuffed animals, chemistry sets, and plastic molding sets account for only nineteen, or about three tenths of 1 percent of the accidents.”

Three tenths of 1 percent
referred to the very items which were the principal targets of the attacks. And these nineteen accidents are not even characterized. Were they the result of poorly made playthings, or were the toys grossly misused?

Grant also said that a report of the findings of the FDA’s two injury-study teams—one in Boston, the other in Denver—over a five-year period indicate that “very few, if any, serious injuries in these two areas result from toys.”

Toys That Don’t Care,
a book by Ed Swartz, is riddled with errors and poor research. “The book is badly written in a very irresponsible manner,” said Henry Coords, chairman of the TMA safety standards committee, to a TV talk-show host. Coords then proceeded to demonstrate how a Fisher-Price toy telephone, attacked in the book for flimsy construction, could in fact withstand very rough treatment.

Said a Playskool official: “Swartz’s book attacks a hammer-and-nail set we made as being unsafe. We had it in our line since 1940 and never had a complaint or injury. Not seldom—never! But we took it off the market, anyway.”

Playthings
magazine: “Many of the products indicted in the book are even hard to identify as either a) a toy in the correct sense of that word or b) a product made by American toy manufacturers . . . one must discredit this author as a thoughtful critic.”

Yet the media, even as recently as the December 1972 issue of
Coronet,
have chosen to accept Swartz as a toy-safety expert—a fact that is especially unsettling in the light of Swartz’s recent announcement that he would be doing a second book on nontoy household-safety problems. It is disturbing to think that his diatribes may be accepted as the last word on consumer safety.

In his book, Swartz makes a few valid points—such as the need for pretesting toys before they are put on the market; the psychological harm of certain playthings; and, the difficulty of recall by the FDA once an unsafe toy has entered marketing channels. But the valuable passages in
Toys That Don't Care
are far outshadowed by its wild and irresponsible attacks on perfectly worthwhile products.

In one section, Swartz rails against a toy iron for not having a safety guard around the plug. Though his book was published in 1971, that toy was last marketed in 1962.

Swartz states that ^he TMA tried to have “exclusive and particular standards” written into the 1969 bill. “Happily the toymakers’ efforts to have the 1969 bill. . . hamstrung were unsuccessful.” Swartz neglects to mention how much TMA cooperation the bill does reflect.

Another example of Swartz’s irresponsibility is a hideous photo of a burned child, evidently meant to bolster Swartz’s attack against all kinds of thermal toys. However, the child in the picture was not burned by a thermal toy, but by a comforter!

Discussing plastic caps for cap pistols, Swartz claims they are more dangerous than paper ones and notes that they are illegal in many states, including Ohio, where a major plastic-cap maker, Ohio Art, is headquartered.

The company replied that it knows of no state or federal agency that has ever stated that plastic caps are more dangerous than paper ones. “And it is not illegal to sell plastic caps in Ohio. We are shipping to stores and distributors in this state every week.”

In condemning thermal toys, Swartz repeated one of the FDA’s biggest mistakes. In late 1970, it tried to ban Kenner’s Easy-Bake Oven and similar products from the market.

The Easy-Bake Oven was introduced by Kenner in 1964 as a toy that capitalized on children’s love of snack foods. It could be used to bake miniature cakes, fudge, pizza, pretzels, and other tidbits. Two one-hundred-watt bulbs heat up the food; in order to install or replace them, the parent must remove two screws from the back of the oven and take off a rear plastic plate. These two screws are not easy to remove. An adult with a screwdriver has to work carefully to get them.

“Well, Swartz did a vicious thing,” said a Kenner spokesman. “He appeared on a TV talk show and displayed the Easy-Bake Oven with its back already removed. Then he said, ‘Look how easy it is to get burned on the light bulbs,’ and showed the exposed lamps.”

Kenner has sold more than five million of the ovens since it first went on the market. The firm reports that early NEISS findings list no burns or shocks from any toy oven, while HERIRS—a Hospital Emergency Room Injury Reporting System set up by the Product Safety Commission itself— noted only two injuries out of 54,402 product accidents from December 5, 1970, to May 27, 1971. One of these accidents was a toe fracture sustained by a twenty-nine-year-old woman. The other was a strain-sprain of a seven-year-old’s lower arm.

But due to press hysteria and bureaucratic pressure, the FDA decided to ban toy ovens in 1970. A group of affected manufacturers immediately arranged for an informal hearing. The ovens had to be brought to Washington for the demon-stration-the health officials had never seen the toy in operation until that time!

After the meeting, a high-ranking health administrator told the toymen informally that he’d see what he could do to keep the ovens on the market, since they were evidently quite safe. But he feared that political pressure might force the FDA to ban them anyway.

Happily, the ovens were removed from the banned list— although I know at least two Manhattan toy retailers who still refuse to stock “that awful, banned toy.” Easy-Bake sales were drastically reduced because of the bad publicity.

I tested the toy myself and found that while its surfaces do heat up, they do not produce burns. However, the toy does have one actual—though minimal—safety hazard: the two screws which hold the back of the toy in place grow scorchingly hot. The danger is slight, since the screws are tiny and anyone touching them would naturally jerk his fingers away before getting burned. But the firm ought to consider some kind of masking for the bits of metal.

What I find incredible is that despite their thorough crusade, none of the consumer advocates detected this obvious, though minor, defect.

The most maligned toy in the safety crusade is probably Ohio Art’s excellent drawing tool, Etch A Sketch.

The toy, which carries seals of approval from both
Good Housekeeping
and
Parents Magazine,
consists of a sealed plastic frame with two knobs on it that turn to produce a fine line on a glass screen. Inside the frame is a mixture of aluminum powder and plastic pellets which coats the glass, and a stylus that etches designs in the powder. Etch A Sketch is the invention of a now-dead Frenchman, Paul Chaze, a machinist who later licensed the toy to Ohio Art.

Two charges have repeatedly been leveled at the toy: first, that the glass screen is easily broken and has cut many children badly; second, that the powder inside is either corrosive to the touch, dangerous if ingested, or cosmetically damaging in an open wound.

Parents Magazine
ran construction and toxicity tests on the toy. Ten rats were force-fed both the powder and the pellets and then observed for two weeks. The rats were unharmed. “Both components,” said the testing lab, “are therefore considered to be nontoxic.”

Said W. C. Killgallon, Ohio Art president: “It is possible for the powder to cause tattooing if it gets in a wound, but the same thing can be said of any type of dust. A wound must be kept clean.”

The company reports it was the subject of another attack a few days after the mercury-in-tuna fright when Bess Myer-son, on a radio show, claimed that Etch A Sketch is full of mercury.

“This is absolutely false,” said Killgallon.

The supposedly breakable glass screen that has drawn most of the criticism of Etch A Sketch was cited in the final product safety commission report.

“At least twenty-two parents,” it states, “are suing the manufacturer of an Etch A Sketch toy for lacerations suffered by their children from broken glass panels.”

A footnote traces this statistic to a letter dated April 9, 1969, from Allen I. Saeks, a Minneapolis lawyer who represented a case involving a child who fell down some stairs while carrying an Etch a Sketch. The toy broke and she was cut; Saeks was engaged and went to court claiming the accident was the fault of poor construction in Etch A Sketch. Saeks lost the case. The jury found in favor of Ohio Art on April 8, 1969. The very next day, Saeks sent his damaging letter to the product safety commission, which incorporated it in its findings.

“When Saeks was getting his depositions,” said Killgallon, “he had access to our insurance complaint files. He found twenty-two such complaints. Note they were complaints—wot lawsuits, as the safety commission report says.

“Of these complaints, many were beefs about the aluminum powder dirtying up rugs. Only thirteen involved broken glass—thirteen in nine years. Three were closed without payment, seven were closed for less than thirty dollars each, and the rest were closed for over a hundred dollars each.”

Even though
Parents Magazine
judged the toy safe and durable, the company decided to add a plastic sheet over the glass so that if the screen should break, the pieces would stay enclosed within the plastic. Nevertheless, Swartz wrote that “a youngster who leaned on the panel while working on his drawing could easily break it and slash his arm.”

This is demonstrably false. Etch A Sketch is practically impossible to break in normal use, and will also withstand plenty of rough abuse. One woman wrote to Ohio Art to say her child dropped it out of a car window while it was going seventy-five miles an hour. When she recovered the toy, it was intact.

In a demonstration before a court stenographer, Ohio Art had the toy dropped on the sidewalk 1051 times; it didn’t break. At a machine shop, Etch A Sketch was dropped one hundred times on a boiler plate. The plastic case shattered, but the glass was not even chipped.

I visited the Ohio Art factory myself, picked a new Etch A Sketch off the line, and whammed it repeatedly with a hammer. It stayed in one solid piece. I had a woman stand on it, and it did not crack.

There is no doubt in my mind that Etch A Sketch is an excellent, safe toy. But because of the attacks of Elkind, Saeks, and Swartz, the company lost nearly $2.5 million in sales, consumers were misled, and countless children were deprived of a valuable toy.

The TMA contends that American toys have become safer in the past decade, rather than more hazardous. It cites a 1960 study by the National Safety Council showing that for every thirteen to fourteen children arriving at hospitals for injuries attributed to household objects, one was admitted for a toy-associated accident. But in 1970, NEISS findings showed that for every forty to forty-eight children admitted for similar injuries, only one accident was related to a toy.

The TMA. also cites Elkind’s own HERIRS system, whose earliest reports put toys near the bottom of the list of products that cause household accidents. In fact, toys— according to HERIRS—are far safer than beds, springs and mattresses, tables, floors and flooring materials, bathtubs and showers, washing machines, and many other commodities.

To be fair, if the bludgeoning approach of the toy-safety spokesman has been believed too readily by the American consumer, it may be because the toymaker, in the past, has been deaf to justified shopper complaints. Commercials
have
been too strident; some toys
have
been too flimsily made, and break by December 26. The sluggish efforts of some toy firms to correct these and other legitimate problems may have caused the public to welcome the puffed-up safety crusade.