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Plastic legions on the march in W.Va.
MOUNDSVILLE, W.Va. - He has never set foot in the Pentagon, but Francis Turner is America's most powerful and experienced military commander. He led both the American and German armies at Normandy; he pushed aside Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee to seize control of all the troops at Appomattox; he was both the genius who planned the Sioux ambush in the Black Hills and the blockhead who led Custer's men into it.
As owner and director of the Official Marx Toy Museum, Turner is the undisputed warlord of thousands of the little plastic army men who fueled the bloodlust of an entire generation of baby-boomer boys in the 1950s and 1960s.
"These are from the days when toys didn't have to be so politically correct," says Turner, waving his arm at the long, snaking row of glass display cases inside which countless cowboys and Indians, Yankees and Confederates, cavemen and dinosaurs and Martians and astronauts are eviscerating, decapitating and generally disrespecting one another. "That's probably why they were more fun."
Turner's museum, though improbably and inaccessibly located in this all-but-abandoned Rust Belt region that was once the home of the biggest toy-soldier factory in the world, is the Mecca for a growing population of toy collectors (among them: Steven Spielberg, Robert De Niro, Robin Williams and Ruben Blades) searching for the lost armies of their childhood. They come from as far away as Britain to gaze at his displays of plastic carnage.
"I had a man last summer stand right in that spot where you are, staring at my Revolutionary War play set," Turner says. "I'm telling you, he hardly moved. He talked to anybody who came near about how he had one of those sets as a kid, and all the neighbor boys always wanted him to bring it over to play. For some people, this is their lives."
These days, when "playing" means clustering around a video game console or a computer screen, that may seem like a nutty exaggeration. But in the 1950s and '60s, plastic toy soldiers were to little boys what Barbie was to little girls: indispensable and ubiquitous.
They could be bought anywhere from 59 cents for a plastic bagful at a dime store to a princely $6.99 for the elaborately packaged play sets including tin buildings and fortresses. There were so many of them (the Alamo, Valley Forge, D-Day) that the toy sections of department-store catalogs looked like military training manuals.
The demand for plastic soldiers (or spacemen and aliens, cops and gangsters, cavemen and dinosaurs - basically any two groups that wanted to annihilate each other) turned toy tycoon Louis J. Marx, whose company offered the first set around 1950, into the Bill Gates of his day. By the mid-'50s, one of every 10 toys in America was manufactured by Marx, who made the cover of Time magazine. ("As a boy Marx excelled at baseball, basketball, ice-skating and shoplifting," the magazine noted.)
Marx spent little on advertising but cannily coupled his business to another growing baby boomer phenomenon, television. Davy Crockett, Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, The Rifleman and The Untouchables all had their own play sets.
But growing discontent with the Vietnam War launched plastic soldiers on a long march to extinction. When the Marx company went bankrupt in 1978 (six years after Louis Marx sold it for $51 million), they all but vanished from store shelves.
As boomers grew older and richer, though, they began a nostalgic search for the toys they had played with, seeking out plastic soldiers at garage sales and flea markets. The hobby boomed with the Internet; nearly 5,000 eBay customers last month were offering toy soldiers for sale.
Also booming: prices. A play set based on the 1950-55 TV show Tom Corbett, Space Cadet that sold new for $5.89 goes for $600 or more now that collectors are on the trail.
Ironically, the 57-year-old Turner's childhood didn't include Marx toys - or almost any other toys, either. "We lived up on an old farm, about a mile from the nearest hard road," he remembers. "We were dirt-poor, is all I can say."
His interest in the toys was piqued in 1982, when the Marx bankruptcy case was finally settled, and the company's property - including the toy-soldier factory in Glen Dale, W.Va., just north of Moundsville - went on the auction block. Turner, a factory-equipment salesman, won the bidding on a large lot of miscellaneous office machinery, only to discover it also contained "a five-gallon bucket full of popes" - leftover pieces from a Marx religious play set - and other plastic figures.
"I sold a few at flea markets and gave them to friends," he says. "I had no idea that anybody collected this stuff, much less the kind of prices they were paying for it. I probably gave away $30,000 worth of toys."
But collectors who heard he had Marx figures for sale sought him out, and soon Turner was scouting for them, hitting garage sales in the Glen Dale region, where former Marx employees often sold toys they'd brought home for their children. The more he looked at the snarling little Al Capones from The Untouchables play set or the dead horses from the Civil War sets, the more fascinated he was. He started keeping some of the play sets instead of reselling them.
"I got hooked," he admits.
By 1998, Turner owned several hundred play sets, huge filing cabinets full of old Marx documents, and a three-ton set of factory molds stored in his garage with a neighbor's tractor.
"We've either got to open a museum, or I have to sell my collection," he told his wife.
The museum, which opened in 2001, is in an old grocery store here, less than a mile from the site of the Glen Dale factory and not far from the old Marx dump sites that collectors still dig through in search of buried plastic treasure. About 130 play sets are on display, with a generous sampling of other Marx toys, including various editions of Johnny West (an earlier, cowboy version of G.I. Joe) and the plastic Big Wheel tricycle.
"It is one of the most amazing collections I've ever seen," says Rusty Kern, publisher of Playset Magazine, the Colorado Springs-based bible of the hobby. "That museum is one of the most fertile environments conceivable for recalling the toys of the 1950s and 1960s, the toys that made some of our astronauts astronauts and some of our generals generals."
There are some concessions to female baby boomers, at least in their pre-feminist versions: farm sets, toy kitchens and a doll - Sindy, Marx's ill-fated 1970s attempt to break into the Barbie market.
"Cindy Brady, from The Brady Bunch, used to be in ads for that doll," Turner notes. "I don't know if they really sold that many, but the girls who had them must have loved them. Women come in here and see that doll, and they just burst into tears."
Prominently missing: the grand Marx dollhouse that came with not only its own birdbath and fox-hunting run, but also a fallout shelter. "They just put that out for a little while, around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and I've only seen one in my whole life," Turner says.
But the heart of the museum is the vast array of fighting men, their homicidal impulses no less fierce for their 2-inch height. You can see American troops storming ashore under fire from German bunkers at Normandy; Ben Hur's deadly chariot race with his Roman masters (while Hur's forlorn companions look on from their place at a molded plastic slave market); the U.S. Cavalry vanquishing Indians at Fort Apache, or vice versa at Custer's Last Stand; or Eskimos dragging the corpses of baby seals in a Antarctic set.
Clubbing baby seals may seem a hallucinatory concept for a toy in this day and age, but it's got plenty of company here. Consider this ad from a Sears & Roebuck Christmas catalog, which Turner has delightedly posted alongside his Untouchables feds-and-gangsters play set: "Get the goods on the hoods, corner 'em in the warehouse, and plug 'em with the tiny bullet-shooting cap pistol."
"You think that's something, look at this," Turner says, wheeling out an Atomic Cannon - a giant Marx toy patterned after a real U.S. Army weapon of the early 1960s. "This thing shoots three-inch shells 60 feet. When we set it up, my son fired one across the room that hit me right in the head and raised a welt. You can't see that these days. None of these guns - this one shoots pellets, this one shoots sparks, they all shoot something."
