The Marx Toys story: Iconic toys once made in Erie and Girard were Christmas favorites

This is the first in a three-part series about Marx Toys and the people who made them.

Part II: For Erie and Girard toymakers, it was all hands on deck for Christmas

Part III: The Marx Toys story: Generations of Erie and Girard workers made toys

Toys under the tree on Christmas morning weren't always made at the North Pole.

For a half-century, until 1980, many were made in Erie and Girard by Marx Toys. The company founded by "Toy King" Louis Marx — as Fortune magazine dubbed him in 1946 — was the largest toy manufacturer on the planet with factories here, in West Virginia, and worldwide at its peak after World War II. The company employed generations of Erie County workers full-time and seasonally as Christmas approached.

Their Big Wheel trikes, model trains, wind-up toys, and toy soldier sets were among Marx Toys bestsellers worldwide. Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots even got movie cameos, as vintage toys in "The Santa Clause 2" and "Toy Story 2."

And each Christmas, local toymakers became toy givers, courtesy of Marx Toys.

Employees were invited to take toys home for their families. And a truck delivered toys to children on the company's Christmas list each year, usually arriving in mid-afternoon on Christmas Eve, said Steve Scully. The longtime C-Span host, now host of a national politics program on Sirius XM and a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., grew up on Connecticut Drive in Erie.

Scully's family received toys each Christmas from the mid-1960s until 1975 courtesy of family friend Bill Keller, manager of Marx Toys in Erie at that time.

"Bill told my parents that with 13 children, five sets of twins, Louis Marx would want (us) to have some of the unsold toys as a gift to our family," Scully said. "It was a real-life Santa Claus experience... and of course my parents ensured we were out of the house when the truck came, because those toys all came from Santa (courtesy of Louis Marx, as we learned later)."

'Elves only knew how to make Marx toys'

Dennis Kubiak and his siblings received so many Marx toys as birthday and Christmas gifts that, "I think we lost our belief in Santa Claus fairly early in life. Either that, or his elves only knew how to make Marx toys," Kubiak said.

His dad, Bob Kubiak, was personnel manager at Marx's West 18th and Raspberry streets factory in the 1950s and 1960s.

Dennis Kubiak's favorite Marx toy was a missile launcher that he got on his eighth birthday, exactly one year after the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis ended.

"It was a good sized, mostly steel, toy truck, with a spring-loaded cannon mounted on it. It could shoot hefty rubber-tipped 'missiles,' probably 20 feet or more. Not the safest toy for an eight-year-old and would probably never see the light of day with today's product safety standards. But I managed to play with it without any injuries to myself or others," Kubiak, now of Dover, Pennsylvania, said.

His brother, Dave Kubiak, favored a Marx Stutz Bearcat scooter and later an electric go-kart.

"The battery wasn't rechargeable, so when it died, he removed the motor and used the go-kart to coast down the hill on Wayne Street, from 36th to 35th Street, hoping there was no cross traffic at the intersection," Dennis Kubiak said.

For Dave Gianoni, the best-ever Marx toy was a cabled, two-foot tall robot made by the company in the 1960s. Gianoni's grandmother, Ligia Yacobozzi, worked at Marx Toys and often gave toys to her grandchildren.

"I still have my mini tool set that she gave me for Christmas one year. But my favorite of all time was the Great Garloo," Gianoni, now of Harrisburg, said. "It was green in color and could move forward and back and turn, and it could bend over at the waist. Its arms moved in and out and could grasp/hold something as well."

Helen Christensen, 84, of Erie, still has a firetruck from Marx's Stutz Bearcat line that she fell in love with as a young adult, when her sister worked for Marx Toys.

"I came home from college one Christmas and saw it at the fireplace. It was such a beautiful toy that I was upset when my sister gave it away to a friend who had a young child," Christensen said. "But she got another one for me."

There were dollhouses and other "girly" toys, too. Retired Fairview third-grade teacher Janice Fohner, of Girard, especially loved the Budding Beauty Vanity.

"It was a little pink plastic dressing table with a kind of facsimile of a mirror," Fohner said. "It was my own pink, girly place when I was a little girl."

'I treasure it'

Sheila Dwyer Grove remembers an assortment of Marx toys in a big box in her father's chambers at the Erie County Courthouse. The late James B. Dwyer was a judge in the Erie County Court of Common Pleas and presided over more than 5,500 adoptions from 1964 to 1985.

"He received more satisfaction from presiding over these important events than any other aspect of his service on the bench. With the cooperation of the late Bill Keller from Marx Toys, he gave each child a toy as a memento of the occasion," Grove said.

A friend who released her young son for adoption recently told Grove that her now-adult son still has the large Marx soldier that the judge gave him.

"She wanted me to know that he told her of the toy he had been given when he was adopted, and how consoling it was for her to know of that gift of comfort for her child," Grove said.

Four generations of children have played with the Marx train that Tom Uhrmacher found under the Christmas tree at his Lighthouse Street, Erie, home 73 years ago.

Now 81 and living in Rochester, New York, Uhrmacher sets up the engine, caboose, cars, track and crossing signal each Christmas for his three children, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

"I treasure it," said the former Erie Daily Times reporter.

Memorabilia: What we collect and why

Contact Valerie Myers at vmyers@timesnews.com.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Marx Toys made in Erie were Christmas favorites for more than 50 years