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The Heinz History Center has a new exhibit featuring toys from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. And though the collection is on loan from the Minnesota Historical Society, there is an Ohio Valley connection. Many of the toys were produced by Louis Marx & Company, which operated its main plant in Glen Dale from 1934 to 1980.
“It’s been a very interactive exhibit,” said curator Emily Ruby. “So families come in. It’s fun to see parents showing their kids what they played with.”
The 8,000-square foot exhibit is broken into three “living rooms” one from each decade – featuring toys of the era as well as a television showing period-specific toy commercials.
(Mr. Potato Head, we find out, was the first toy to be advertised on television in 1952.)
Ruby pointed out that advances in plastics made toys much easier to mass produce starting in the 1950s. Other items in the 1950s section included a coonskin cap, a Marx-produced Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox and insulated beverage container and Marx-produced figurines, including Gen. George Armstrong Custer, Davy Crockett and Sitting Bull.
Some of the themes of the 1960s section include more television, Barbie (which was introduced in 1959), the space race and the Cold War. The famous GI Joe came out of this era, and was marketed as an “action figure” not a doll, to appeal to boys.
The 1970s are portrayed as the “dawn of the digital age,” and this portion of the exhibit features an old Atari video game console, as well as a “toys parents hate” display complete with lawn darts. There’s also a pretty compelling Cooties display.
Other highlights include a “hands-on garage” featuring plastic bowling pins, Nerf balls and hula hoops; a staircase where visitors can race Slinkys; and a play space filled with classic games, such as Hungry Hungry Hippos, Barrel Of Monkeys and Trouble.
As mentioned previously, the Marx toys theme is present throughout. The corridor leading up to the exhibit features an up-lit, stylized depiction of a Big Wheel, which Marx invented in 1969 and produced in Glen Dale. And of course there’s an interactive set of Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots.
Established in 1919, Louis Marx & Co. produced a seemingly endless array of affordable toys. After World War II, the company made the switch from tin to plastic as its material of choice. Plastic was cheap, durable and easily molded into the hundreds of characters required for the play sets that became Marx’s mainstay in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Big Wheel was probably the most popular Marx Toy to come out of Glen Dale, according to Moundsville’s Marx Toy Museum curator Francis Turner.
“The Glen Dale plant ran three shifts around the clock,” he said. “And they could make 1,000 Big Wheels per shift per line. And they ran three lines. So they could make 9,000 Big Wheels a day.”
Turner said he’s been to the Heinz Hall toy exhibit and found it to his liking.
“Nice,” he said. “Real nice.”
The exhibit goes until May 31.
The Heinz History Center is located at 1212 Smallman St. in the Strip District of Pittsburgh and is open daily from 10 am to 5 pm.
A little closer to home, the Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum in Elm Grove, 144 Kruger St., Wheeling, has hundreds of examples of Marx trains and toys. The museum’s collection got its start with the owners’ collection of Marx trains. It is home to the annual Marx Toy Convention. The museum also boasts large displays of LEGOs, K’Nex, Barbies, dolls, miniatures, Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars and more. A working old-fashioned player piano, known as a Nickelodeon, stands in the lobby, awaiting a quarter to spring into action.