On my back porch in Roscoe Village, under the L tracks, with an electric drill in a stand that was my father's as my only power tool, Lund and Company took its first steps back in 1984. I spent countless hours and days searching for inexpensive, used equipment. As a start up money was tight. It would be tight again years later when the down years came upon us. But for many a year the future was so bright we had to wear shades. 

 

 

            

I crawled and squeezed my way through the dark and cavernous floors of Kaji’s warehouses, loaded to overflowing with the industrial machinery and office equipment he bought at auction, looking for a good deal on inexpensive used machine tools, lathes, sanders, drill presses, mills, work tables, and desks. We were moving into our first real office and we needed everything. Somewhere in Kaji’s many warehouses, everything was to be had, haggled over, moved, and installed. 

            

Money was tight and everything was used, cheap Chinese tools. I later realized that all the time I spent searching was a trade-off, and maybe not such a good one, for the lower prices I got on the equipment. Time is money, it is irreplaceable, and it is easy to squander it in the interest of saving a few dollars. 

            

We later bought new equipment, to better make use of our time, but still used inexpensive Chinese-made lathes and mills, which were adequate to our needs. Later still, we upgraded to older, US-made machine tools, back when Hardinge and Bridgeport were world standards, now since gone. It was a big step to get our first Bridgeport. 

 

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The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY has to be the greatest museum in the world. It is truly a national treasure.

 

 

            

On a recent trip to the far east reaches of North America (where they have time zones I have never heard of before) I stopped in Rochester to visit the Museum of Play. I had met with some of their people in the past, and even contributed some of our products to a recent display, but I never had the pleasure of actually seeing the place.  

 

 

            

The museum takes your breath away from the moment you enter past the actual working Merry-Go-Round and the authentic, fully functioning, old-time, shiny aluminum diner. You will continue to be amazed as you pass from gallery to gallery, past exhibits celebrating play of all kinds and toys of every description. There is far too much to see in a single afternoon. I would need at least a week to soak it all in. 

 

 

            

While the museum has almost every toy ever made and collects every new toy that comes to market every year, year after year, it is no mere toy museum. It is the documentation, display, description, the living and breathing celebration of play - from dress up, to sticks, stones, and cardboard boxes. It also publishes The American Journal of Play, an academic journal on play, its meaning, and importance - possibly the only such publication of its kind.   

            

Now, I may be biased, but my instinctive response, once I stopped hyperventilating, was that this is the greatest museum I have ever seen - perhaps the greatest museum on Earth. It is not just a collection, or a display. It is an attempt to delve into and present an explanation of all the dimensions of play so that we can begin to understand what play is in the human experience and in the context of culture and humanity. 

            

Go there. See it. You won’t be disappointed.  

 

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My schoolmate Bob, the Comans' youngest son, once thought his older brother was pounding on the bathroom door and spouting obscenities at him for taking too long, only to learn when he came out that his brother was not at home. I always hoped and feared I might experience just one tiny ghostly event, but no. I still do, actually. The next house I buy is going to be haunted.

      

But the Comans had ghosts in abundance.

  

Each day two sets of handprints would appear on their antique cabinets, one over the other. One set appeared to be those of a small child, and above them were an adult's, but with spider fingers - having an extra joint on each finger (perhaps an artifact of inbreeding, as Hillsborough was reported to have the largest degenerate gene pool in the south at the time). One day, as Mrs. Coman was about to wipe off the prints, they began to move, sliding down and off the face of the cabinet, never to be seen again.

 

 

 

I always wanted to keep a brick or a board from that house, in hopes that a ghost remained in it. Then I could store it in a safe deposit box and rent it to people who wanted a ghost in their own home. Rent a Ghost. I think one could franchise that idea if you just got enough pieces of haunted houses.

 

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When the Comans had their house worked on before they moved in, the workers noted that it had a cold heart, a phenomenon often reported in haunted houses. The house had a central cylinder of air noticeably colder than its surroundings. There was also a dark closet that none of the workers would go into. Shining a flashlight into the gloom of the closet had little effect, and if you put the flashlight in the closet and shone it back at yourself, only a dim light could be seen.

 

 

One day a prolonged creak, followed by a loud crack as if a large timber had broken, was heard by all, and suddenly the cold heart was gone and the dark closet was no longer dark.

 

But that was by no means the end of odd events in their home. In a room they called the borning room, where generations of babies had been born over the years, the Comans would often hear murmuring, the faint sound of teacups and saucers perhaps, and the cooing of women who might have gathered to admire a new baby just born. The family was generally unafraid, though, as they felt theirs were friendly spirits. 

 

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When I lived there, my friends the Comans owned a lumberyard in town and lived in a 1700’s vintage home full of priceless Cloisonne vases from the Ming Dynasty. Theirs was a most unusual variation on quiet country living. Mrs. Coman was a psychic, and neighbor and friend of Dr. J.B. Rhine and his wife, who was also a psychic and able to telepathically call her children to dinner from miles away. Dr. Rhein founded of the Rhine Institute for Parapsychological Studies at Duke University, the first of its kind.

Furniture would inexplicably move in the Comans' home, dishes would fly to the center of the room, cats would suddenly gather mewing with distress and rubbing against your leg, often just before something odd would happen.

 

 

The girls began to think he was stalking them. At night, a car would often stop on the gravel road out front of their house, hidden by the tall corn. It was easy to hear the movement of cars on the gravel from a distance on an otherwise quiet summer night. The car and driver would sit in idle a while, and later drive off slowly, Night after night. They could sometime even see the headlights through the corn.

 

Then, one night the idling car engine stopped and the lights turned off. This went on for a while, night and after night. 

 

 

The girls did not like this new development, but they liked their cute log cabin in the country and planned to stay. However, they soon changed their minds.  

 

One night the car slowly rolled to a halt on the gravel road. It idled a while, then the engine was turned off, but the headlights stayed on. Then the headlights went off and the car door opened and shut. They thought they could hear footsteps in the gravel, but they were so busy gathering up pillows and blankets and heading out the back door, running as fast as their legs would carry them into the darkness of the woods, that they couldn’t be sure.

      

They spent the night in the woods, and the next day they moved out. Back to town, back to civilization. The appeal of country living had worn off.

 

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When I lived in Hillsborough, North Carolina, it was a cute, quiet town with a seething cauldron of violence and malevolence beneath the surface. They were Klu Klux Klan rallies and marches down Main Street. My friends the Comans once inadvertently made a turn onto Main Street in Hillsborough, and found themselves in the midst of one of these KKK parades. For years afterward Mr. Coman was highly respected by the people in town, as they thought he must have been a high level Klansman.

      

 

Not far from town on Orange Grove Rd, a gravel road like the one I lived on nearby, there were two college-aged girls living in a log cabin. They were acquaintences of mine and friends of my friend Michael. As fate would have it, their next-door neighbor (who lived a ways down the gravel road and out of sight) was a mass murderer. He had killed his wife and kids and served 20 years or so in prison . . . 

 

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We were aboard ship for ten weeks between Charleston, SC and Newport News, VA, launching subrocs and chasing them the rest of the day. We retrieved them only to launch them again and again. Ours was a WWII ship, flimsily built in a hurry in the 1940's to meet the needs of the war effort, and we were outmanned and outgunned by the rest of our fleet. In an effort to impress the admiral and to keep up with newer ships and more modern technology, our officers over-drove the ship against the warning of the boiler rooms.

 

"She can’t take it captain, she’ll break in two!" But the captain said, "Push it, give me all she's got!" And she burst a pipe of 600-degree steam. All that could be done was seal the compartment and hope the ship didn’t break in two. The ship's hull bulged outward with the pressure, we learned later, but it did not burst.  

 

 

 

World War III had not begun, much to my relief.

 

If my summer aboard ship had turned out therwise I’d have likely followed in my father's steps and been a sailor. He had served in WWII and Korea, and I was born whilst he was at sea. I had wanted to be a naval officer since I was a kid.

 

If I had served aboard an aircraft carrier, as some of my fellow midshipmen had, I might have gone on to fly jets. That I would have loved, as I learned later in life when I acquired my first motorcycle. I love to go fast. Ah, the thrill of speed.

 

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"General quarters, general quarters! All hands to battle stations! This is not a drill. Repeat - this is not a drill!"

      

I was sitting on the mess deck having bug juice and lunch when the klaxon rang. I’d heard it many times, but this time was different. Rather than all hands leisurely finishing a drink or mouthful of food, the mess deck exploded with trays flying and men running in all directions. This was the real deal. This was no drill. This was all hands to battle stations aboard the USS Robert H McCard that day, DD822.

      

 

 

From the flag deck far above the rest of the ship I watched the barrels of big guns and the subroc rocket launchers swivel and raise up and down in preparation for who knew what. But this was no drill - this was war. What else could it be? Why else does a ship go to battlestation war readiness? I imagined the greatest fear of my youth had at last come to pass - that I might see attacking bombers, jets, or missiles overhead, racing toward America, my home, my family, my little town, and all would be destroyed as WWIII began. I envisioned nuclear mutual self-destruction and that only we at sea might survive. I had a vivid imagination. 

 

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The escapees were found asleep in a small cave and quietly surrendered. It was the West Virginia State Police that remarked that 'those boys were lucky we found them.' There was no telling what would have happened had they been located by the good citizens of War instead.

      

In the aftermath of the roadblock, escape, and capture, the town was still abuzz with high energy and armed to the teeth. Being assured that we were not in danger, and with the presense of so many guns satisfactorily explained, we were invited home to Rocky's for dinner and a place to sleep. He was a miner like his father - a short, wide man with an enormous bushy black beard like a dwarf king from one of the Hobbit movies.

      

Rocky's family was building a seven story ‘skyscraper’ house next door to their current one, but seven years into the project they had only a steel I-beam skeleton 2½ stories high. I didn’t see that they would ever complete that project. Rocky taught us how to rapidly descend a steep slope to outrun a bear. He shared his West Virginia hospitality and sent us on our way the next day. We got on our bikes and headed west, and ironically, the next town we encountered on our route was Justice, West Virginia. Justice had been served only 24 hours earlier and 30 miles down the road.

 

 

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West Virginia is a special case amoungst our 50 states. It is practically our own third world nation right near Washington DC. On my cross-country bike ride long ago, passing through West Virginia remains high on my list of indelible memories.

      

It was not even a week into our cross country journey that we rode into the little town of War, West Virginia. The town was buzzing. There were kids on bikes everywhere, many with rifles on their shoulders as they steered their banana-seat bikes with one hand. The sidewalks were crowded with men, women, and children, and they all seemed to be armed. For a couple of long-haired college grads on a long-distance bike ride they did not seem like a welcoming committee.

      

 

 

One group of men, all holding firearms of a wide variety, hailed us loudly as we attempted to speed up, not pause, to just get through this little hornets' nest of armed activity. We tried to ignore the hailers, but they persisted, so we pulled over, as they did have guns.   

      

The man who hailed us down was Rocky Oakes, and he told us the tale of what had riled up his otherwise sleepy little town. Some days earlier there had been a prison break down in Georgia and the escapees had managed to rape, plunder, and pillage their way north until they were stopped at a road block by the West Virginia state police on the road leading west out of War.

      

 

 

The escapees abandoned their car and headed up into those steep, wooded hills of West Virginia. When the citizenry of War heard what happened, they took up arms and headed into the hills after them.

 

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So, miserable and wet, I stood in the rain at the base of a large hill like a drowned rat with my broken-down bicycle on my shoulder and all my belongings on my back. I had my thumb out, hoping in vain that someone might pick me up. 

            

Miraculously, someone did. His family fed me, put me up for the night, dried my clothes, and gave me a good breakfast the next morning. What truly made this a miracle, though, was the town was I happened to end up in and what my benefactor happened to do for a living. The town was home to a Schwinn bicycle factory, and the man who picked me up worked there as a bike mechanic. 

 

 

            

When things like this happen you just gotta believe God’s hand moves in our lives. Even this morning, as I write this, I have just seen His hand provide for me in a time of need. Thank you, Lord. 

            

A bicycle is a toy of a sort, a recreational activity. It is a kind of play, I suppose, riding the 3800 miles, as I did, from Carolina to California. Children and adults do share this one form of play, among a few others. So that is how this story relates to the toy industry, and this blog. Fair enough? Fair dinkum? It may be a bit of a stretch, but I beg your indulgence. Please file all complaints in the circular file in the corner. 

 

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On my first solo long-distance bicycle ride, I rode through a solid week of rain from Amagansett, Rhode Island to Western New York (Lewiston, actually). On my way there my bike broke down in the mountains of western Massachusetts - the pedal crank bearings broke into pieces.  

 

Drenched, with an unrideable bicycle on my shoulder and a wet backpack full of wet clothes, I stood at the base of a large hill and stuck out my hand hoping against hope that I might get a ride. 

            

 

 

After not too long, a fellow in an International Harvester pickup drove by and told me to throw the bike in the back. He took me to his house where he and the wife, having grown sons of their own, fed me, dried my clothes, and put me up for the night. A miracle indeed. 

            

But wait, there’s more. 

 

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I am the beneficiary of a multitude of miracles.

 

 

 

To have the privilege of spending my life making a living creating products that bring people joy is a miracle.  

 

To be able to remain in business for 26 years is a miracle. 

            

To be able to make it to another year, both in business and in life is a miracle, especially since in the invention business we essentially begin afresh each year. Our products have  a six month life and then they are gone. So each year we start from scratch - and it hasn’t gotten easier. Most all in the industry would say it is more difficult each year.

 

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Back in 1984 my cross-country bike trip buddy Rob knew one of the authors of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, when it was just a black and white comic, unknown and undiscovered. After dinner at Peter Laird's home, Rob, Peter, and his comic writing partner were all washing dishes and trying to invent bad guys - villains that would become the enemies of the four Ninja Turtles.  

 

 

 

Someone raised up a cheese grater and suggested a villain, ‘The Grater’. Someone else changed that to 'Shredder’ and an iconic comic book villain was born. Rob was later presented with one of the first 500 printed copies of the first TMNT comic and asked to read and comment. It just wasn’t his cup of tea.  

 

 

 

By 1988 it was a growing sensation.  

 

About that time we too came across this still obscure black and white comic featuring the crime-fighting heroes in a half-shell. We considered contacting them to get the license for toys but worried it might cost $5000 or more to do so. It was more moolah than we could scrape together. So instead we created a line of toys inspired by the comic, but different. We showed it a couple times and got a ‘cease and desist’ letter in the mail. It seemed Playmates Toys was already working on it.  

 

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Take toys out of Happy Meals? What is the benefit of that? Seriously. Toys are not trivial objects of entertainment. Toys entertain, inspire, educate and invite thinking and doing. Toys inspire the choices children later make in their adult lives. Toys change the world. Unfortunately, this is little known and seldom unacknowledged. 

            

 

 

Frank Lloyd Wright's toy blocks inspired him to become an architect. What if those blocks had come in a Happy Meal? More importantly, what if they hadn't? 

        

The Wright Brothers credit a toy airplane they received as a birthday gift as inspiring their fascination with flight, without which powered flight would never have been born. What if that airplane had come in a Happy Meal? Or not? How might the world be different? Toys entertain and inspire children, and children alter the world as adults.

            

Toys matter. Read Inventing Kindergarten by Norman Brosterman to see clearly how the toys, or ‘gifts’ of the original kindergarten educational program influenced some of the 20th century’s greatest minds. 

 

Ask yourself and ask others, "What was the influence of toys in your life?" One Nobel Prize winning scientist was quoted as saying that one of the greatest losses to our culture has been the relative simplicity of the modern building blocks that have replaced the far more versatile, challenging, and complex Erector sets made up of motors, belts, and gears. What he was saying was, "Toys matter. They really do matter." 

          

Please don’t take the toys away. 

 

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Since I was going back to college and couldn’t take the tarantula with me, I gave it to my good friend Bill F - a welder, coin jeweler, and all 'round interesting roust-a-bout, because I knew he would love to have it. And he did. He was so thankful.

 

When I inquired about it a few years later I found it had died and been laid to rest in Bill's freezer. He later silver plated it - and oh, by the way, he was deathly afraid of spiders. Nice gift, Lund. 

 

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While in Frog Level, I lived a ways down a gravel road in a shack, one might call it, without running water or even an outhouse. It cost only $15 a month in rent, and I lived next door to my good friend Bill Breeze and across the street from his son. It was the house that Bill had raised his family in. The only insulation on the wood siding was some newspaper nailed inside the wall between the 2x4s.

 

I kept my water in a plastic garbage can and since my wood stove was shot full of holes and wouldn’t stay hot through the night, I would have to break a thin layer of ice on winter mornings when I dipped a pan into the water to put on the stove to make coffee or hot chocolate to warm up.

 

You should have seen David and me fill my garbage can full of water from his well and carry it, sloshing wildly in his pickup truck, back up the deeply rutted hill. I most always had a half-filled can of water at the end of that trip.    

 

 

 

Without my electric blanket I would have died. My back yard looked like a junkyard in the woods full of rusting old cars, trucks, and major appliances that Bill would use as storage lockers for his moonshine, or homemade wine (that sometimes looked more like milk).

 

 

 

At the time I had wanted to be a hermit, to write and study karate seriously. I didn’t do either and decided being a hermit just wasn’t for me. After a year or so I moved back into town.  

 

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Frog Level is a rural community in North Carolina just outside the quaint, sleepy-seeming town of Hillsborough, and not far from Chapel Hill, home of the University of North Carolina, and Durham, the cigarette town and home of my alma mater Duke University. Not much larger than the T-intersection where once there was a country store that was the center of the rag tag community, Frog Level was home to the leather workshop where I served as an apprentice to learn the craft.

            

Quiet though the town seemed, violence was never far away. My mechanic Fred was originally from Maine and had a Maine accent on top of his adopted home state’s southern accent. This combined with the fact that he was an alcoholic and almost always drunk, ensured that one (that is a literary convention referring to me, actually) really couldn’t understand a word he said. It was like he spoke in some unknown language.  

            

 

 

But folks said he was an automechanic savant, a genius. He could work miracles. Well, my 1951 Willys pickup truck dream vehicle had never run once from the moment I bought it. It sorely needed a miracle. To pay Fred (and I know you will say, ‘What was he thinking?’) I would take him to the ABC store each morning for a bottle of cheap liquor and instruct him not to drink it until after he did the work. Then each afternoon I’d come by and Fred would be nowhere to be found. Duh!

            

Needless to say, no work was ever done and my dream wheels never rolled again. Go ahead and look up "dumb" in the dictionary if you want to see my photo. Fred met his tragic end, I learned a few years ago. He was driving drunk and crashed head-on into another car whose driver was also inebriated. Both drivers were killed. One was Fred, the other, his wife.

 

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It used to be that one could ride his thumb cross-country and up and down the coasts. And so I did.

 

 

      

On one such trip from somewhere in California to somewhere else I was picked up by a sturdy, rough-looking young Carny with scars all over his arms, from a family of Carnies who lived, worked, and traveled with circuses and fairs. In honor of the Green Hornet's karate-kicking sidekick his parents had named him Kato, and to live up to his namesake he spent years studying martial arts. He had a bad attitude.

 

 

      

As we drove, he told me about a recent run-in with the police. He had been pulled over by the CA highway patrol for speeding. He told them he would cooperate with them, but he warned them, ”Just don’t call me Punk.”

      

So, as they pushed his head down to get him into the back seat of the patrol car, one of the officers said, ”get in the car, Punk.” Bad decision. Kato exploded in a rage, and two officers ended up in the hospital by his hands. He may have already done time for that when he picked me up, or maybe he was on the run at that very moment. 

 

As we drove along and continued to talk, I struggled to resist the almost overwhelming urge to call him a Punk. Try not to think of an elephant when I tell you to. It is almost impossible to not do what you are told not to do, or to not think of what you are told not to think of. That’s just how we are wired.

      

So I fought the urge, and he dropped me off to continue my journey down another road. As he drove out of sight I finally was able to yell out, ”You are a Punk, Punk!” There, I said it, and I felt much better.

 

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The Iranian government finally did locate the missing section of the cylinder and bargained with the tribal leaders to buy it back from them. But the tribal leader resisted. This was, after all, a great gift from Allah. The government kept upping the offer; $100,000, $200,000, $500,000, and eventually up to a million dollars. Still the tribal leader refused to give up his gift from Allah. What value was a million dollars deep within the deserts of Iran to a nomadic tribe of Bedouins?  

 

 

 

So the Shah's army killed them all and took the pipe section they had lost.  

 

I sat in the bar nursing my beer in the heat of the New York night, engrossed in this tale that I had been eavesdropping on, and gasped at its shocking conclusion.  

 

Then I was off to bed, to be ready for walking the halls of the Licensing Show and meeting with clients to show new products we were hoping to license.

 

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