Like Father, Like Son: Gompers, 99, Had Front-Row Seat for Rise of Marx Toys
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WHEELING -- One -- or a few hundred -- Father's Day stories could be found by scratching the mere surface of Joe A. Gompers' life. The man had 12 children, for one thing.
There were Saturdays, he said, when his own crew and a stray neighbor kid or two lined up for a turn in a barber's chair the now 99-year-old installed in the basement of the family home.
There were the Decembers when Gompers -- at various times a private attorney, a prosecutor and a state House of Delegates member -- put on a red suit and a beard and headed to the poorest neighborhoods in town with toys in tow.
"I had a big station wagon and I'd just fill that thing up," Gompers said. "I was the biggest Santa Claus you ever saw. I was 6-foot-3 and I had pillows all around me. I was a monster."
The Santa thing is rooted in one of the more unusual tales any dad of any time or place could tell. Gompers said it was his own father, the late attorney William Gompers, who convinced toy king Louis Marx of New York City to locate a mammoth manufacturing plant just down the road in Glen Dale.
Over many decades, William and, later, Joe Gompers represented Marx's local legal interests and were in charge of making sure local children had sufficient toys to fuel their imaginations -- even during the Great Depression.
TRADING SPACES
How did the Ohio Valley become a key component of what would go on to become the largest toy manufacturer in the world as of the 1950s?
In the 1930s, a fledgling Fokker Aircraft sited in Glen Dale began to falter, according to Gompers and history websites. The combination of the Great Depression and one of the company's aircrafts being in the 1931 crash that killed Notre Dame football legend Knute Rockne shuttered the plant and took 500 jobs out of the local economy.
"The plant went bankrupt and it was already for sale," Gompers said of an event that sent development professionals scrambling.
Gompers said a young man named Carl Gustkey was the director of the Wheeling Board of Trade -- a precursor of the Wheeling Area Chamber of Commerce. Gustkey somehow got a hold of a book that included a listing of the few businesses that remained on the prowl and learned that Louis Marx and Company was looking for a place to build a toy factory.
Gustkey brought that intel to William Gompers, Gompers said. "Dad said, 'Let's just get on the train and go talk to him.'"
The two traveled to New York City and convinced Louis Marx to travel back to Wheeling with them. It was 1934 -- a time so economically bleak that food insecurity was not uncommon.
"He wound up buying the factory," said Gompers, who got a first-hand look at such development maneuverings as he was allowed to tag along with his father much of the time. "It would expand almost the whole length of Glen Dale."
While the company retooled during World War II -- during which, Gompers said, the plant produced bullets and shell casings -- it would go on to reach global industry dominance by the 1950s. In the 1970s, it produced the iconic Big Wheel tricycle and Rock'em Sock'em Robots before another economic downturn brought its closure in 1980.
"Dad would take me down there. They utilized the Ford principal - the assembly line," Gompers recalled of the early years that his father provided legal representation for Marx. "There was one machine that would make (tin) wheels. It would spit them out like bullets -- brrrrrrrrt. Guys would pick up a whole bucket of them at a time."
Gompers remembers playing with plenty of Marx toys, including tin soldiers that foretold his later U.S. Navy service in the Pacific Theatre during World War II. In 1957, when his father's death prompted him to launch a second generation of Marx representation, his own children enjoyed similar access to company products.
"We absolutely had enough toys for Christmas when I was a kid," Gompers recalled with a laugh. "Then, I had a bunch of kids and I had enough for them. We had a big time.
"We wore out many wheels on the Big Wheels," he said of his 11 surviving children running the large plastic wheels down to nubs. Indeed, he noted, the kids played so enthusiastically, not a single Marx toy remains in family possession.
Back in the Marx heyday, however, they were all over the house, he said, adding that his own crew particularly loved a toy that would be taboo in today's America -- cowboy-style guns.
"They were beautiful guns. They looked like the real thing," he said. "We had a collection of guns and rifles that you couldn't imagine."
FATHER & SON
Gompers noted he was only 10 when his father and Gustkey were wrangling the Marx deal. But, he was fairly well aware of its unfolding given how the family rolled.
"My dad took me every place he went," Gompers said of sitting in on board meetings and even one bankruptcy proceeding as a child. "He took me in and popped me in a corner and said, 'Be quiet.'"
Seeing how lawyering worked from near infancy, Gompers was intrigued enough to pursue the same career path. He recalled coming home on a Friday after passing his last law school finals and the bar exam in tandem -- hoping for a bit of rest.
"Dad said, 'I'll see you in the office on Monday," Gompers recalled with a laugh, noting his first office turned out to be a junk room full of papers covered with soot from the coal-burning furnaces of the day. "It took me a week just to clean it out."
Tweaking his own career in his early 30s to continue Marx representation after his father's death felt like a given, he noted.
"We went everywhere together," said Gompers, whose extended clan recently reached 100 living family members. "I was his buddy and he was my buddy."