Yes, there is. Or there was. Santa was Louis Marx, a chubby, cigar-chomping captain of industry who created the Marx toy company, once the largest manufacturer of toys in the world. With his wife, nine children, and 13 dogs, he lived in a magnificent Scarsdale mansion that looked like a backdrop from “Gone with the Wind.”
Marx was called the “café-society Santa” and the “Toy King of America”—fitting sobriquets for the maker of Depression-era tin windup toys and for later generations, such popular items as Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, Big Wheel bikes, The Great Garloo, toy trains, dollhouses, and numerous playsets of plastic soldiers that celebrated the Civil War, the battle of Iwo Jima, the Alamo, and other historic events.
At the peak of his financial success, Marx was depicted on the Dec. 12, 1955, cover of Time magazine wearing a broad smile, surrounded by toys and the jolly elf himself.
Competitors said Marx made cheap products (he marketed the first Yo-Yo), but his toys were high quality and affordably priced for the average American family. He eschewed advertising, believing instead that children should not be manipulated by commercials, according to Rusty Kern, who along with his wife Kathy, founded Playset, a publishing company that was dedicated to preserving the heritage of vintage toy soldiers.
“Of course, Sears and Montgomery Ward would carry large catalog photos of playsets in their Christmas wish books but there was no charge for that,” Kern said. “That was not considered an advertising medium.”
Marx disparaged “educational toys”—these, he sniffed were given by stuffy aunts, uncles, and “hermetically-sealed parents who wash their children 1,000 times a day.” The above-mentioned Great Garloo, a green, battery-operated monster, was decidedly not an educational toy.
Marx was my kind of Santa.
And he was generous. According to Time, Marx gave away “a million toys a year” to hospitals and orphanages, asserting that toys were essential to solving the world’s problems. “When you keep a child supplied with toys,” he said, “it gives him security … Toys give children love.”
With his millions, Marx hobnobbed with the crème de la crème of society and was a regular at the ‘21’ Club where he always picked up the check. The 25-room Scarsdale house, which he bought in 1941, was a three-story Georgian-style structure fronted by stately Corinthian columns—it sat off Weaver Street on 21 acres, and featured a stable, outdoor pool, nine fireplaces, and 14 bathrooms.
On Halloween, trick-or-treaters flocked by the hundreds to the big house to get free toys and candy. Some of the kids, it was said, were “repeaters,” sneakily circling back for more. Marx also personally handed out $1 bills to every child, an act of benevolence that nearly backfired one year when a busload of Iona College students showed up.
No king can rule forever—and the king of toys was no exception. Foreign competition, labor strife, and other factors cut into the bottom line and by 1972 Marx decided to retire. He sold the company for a little under $52 million to Quaker Oats.
In 1982, Marx died at the age of 76. A developer bought the Scarsdale estate for $4 million and built more than two dozen luxury homes on the grounds. After a 30-year legal battle between the builder and preservationists the house was demolished—its last remaining vestige being a ghostly, cut-through path flanked by twin stone pillars off Weaver Street.
Louis Marx gave away “a million toys a year” to hospitals and orphanages, asserting that toys were essential to solving the world’s problems.
Marx toys live on, thanks to the power of nostalgia-driven collectors who live by the motto at Playset: “You had your childhood, now get it back.”
But it may cost you. Many Christmases ago, I got a Fort Apache playset, which included cowboys, Indians, and a plastic stockade. It probably set my father back seven bucks. Today, in its original box it would go for about $1,600, according to Kern.
Louis Marx would be delighted.
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