Chapter One

The child's toys and the old man's reasons
Are the fruits of the two seasons.

                                               -- William Blake

Prologue

In the fall of 1961, the world was coming apart.  The Berlin Wall had been built that August, and by October, Russian and American tanks squared off 100 yards apart at Checkpoint Charlie.  The two superpowers had resumed nuclear testing, making thinly veiled threats about their nuclear muscle and sending explicit messages in megatons.  The Soviet Union unleashed a terrifying 60-megaton bomb above the Russian steppe.  In a nationally televised speech, President Kennedy urged Americans to build their own fallout shelters and Life soon whipped up the frenzy with a cover story.  Panicked, some 200,000 families built shelters and stockpiled supplies for the coming Armageddon.  Elsewhere, there were crises in the Congo, in Laos, and in a festering sore called Vietnam.  Across Africa and Asia, tired old empires were dying while sanguine new countries were struggling to be born.
      
In those days before around the clock news, fear filtered slowly into elementary schools.  I knew no more about the world's unraveling than what I learned in third grade.  Our teacher, Mrs. Williams, a short, blonde woman with a pleasingly plump face, assured us we would be safe.  We were 30 miles from L.A, she said again and again.  The worst an atomic bomb might do was blow in our classroom windows.  That's why we had to lower the blinds – to block any flying glass -- before we ducked and covered under our desks.  But I had little time to care about things falling apart.  I was too busy putting things together with the gift I had received for my eighth birthday -- an Erector Set.
      
It was the heaviest of all the packages I found on the dining room table.  It was the only one that rewarded me for shaking it -- clanking like some steel robot in a cage.  When I emptied the set on our linoleum floor, pure possibility spread before me.  Shiny girders, notched along their length, clattered against each other.  Each seemed to invite the tiny nuts and bolts that came in a separate package.  Perforated steel plates promised to be the flatbed of any truck or the road crossing any bridge I cared to build.  There were bright brass wheels notched around each rim to double as pulleys.  There were miniature crankshafts, six-inch axles, and yellow and red steel plates in odd assorted shapes.  The set came with a manual, but like all manuals, it wasn't much good.  It pictured dozens of models but offered no instructions whatsoever.  Merely by studying the drawings, I was supposed to whip together a Walking Beam Engine, a Gantry Crane, or a Grocery Wagon.  I tossed the manual aside.  I was eight now.  I'd build what I wanted to build.  Besides, what was a Gantry Crane anyway?
      
Within days of opening my Erector Set, I had made several metal mutants.  Dutifully, I cranked out a simple slide, a small wagon, and a crane that looked more like those found in wetlands than on a construction site.  Only then did I look at the manual.  On the inside cover I found "A Personal Message form the Inventor of Erector."  I was "a lucky boy to get an Erector Set," the message said.  "No other construction set contains so many different parts and builds so many different models."  Did I know that the U.S. Patent Office had issued more than 100 patents for Erector parts?  I sure didn't.  But I was about to learn that Erector provided "double-header fun" because "every new model will bring you a new thrill."  The message was signed, "Your friend, A.C. Gilbert."  And there on the inside cover was a black-and-white picture of the "inventor of Erector and founder of the Gilbert Hall of Science."
      
Slightly balding with a hint of a sneer, A.C. Gilbert didn't look like anyone's friend.  He looked more like some physics professor in dire need of a sabbatical.  I found it hard to believe he had invented the Erector Set, or that anyone had.  This pile of girders, nuts, and bolts couldn't be an "invention" like our TV or hi-fi.  Instead it seemed like a replica of the industrial world, as if the steel girders of local buildings in progress had been recreated in miniature.  The Erector Set couldn't have been "invented."  It just was.
      
Throughout that fall, while the world unraveled, I struggled to assemble a world of my own.  I managed to build a simple Sled and a miniature bridge.  One rainy weekend, I even built a Farm Wagon.  While the rain drummed on my bedroom window, my wagon rolled across the floor.  After several days of rolling, I parked it on a shelf for the winter.  But for every model I finished, I trashed two or three.  Frustrated by screws the size of ants, I hurled my Windmill Pump across the bedroom.  Furious at girders that would not fit where I needed them, I twisted my See Saw Wagon until it could neither see nor saw.  Finally, after months of wrestling with it, I put my Erector Set in the closet and only took it out on rainy days.  I had other toys to play with by then.  Robots that talked.  Police cars with real sirens.  Walkie talkies.  Silly Putty.
       
I soon forgot all about my Erector Set.  Its pieces were scattered and left to rust who knows where.  The simple steel toy that helped me assemble a world no longer seemed a part of my childhood, nor of anyone else's.  In college, when talk turned to beloved toys, we Boomers shared fond memories of hula hoops and Etch-a-Sketches.  Erector Sets?  No one I knew ever mentioned one.  But years later I learned that I had been asking the wrong kids.  And I was just as wrong about A.C. Gilbert, the ersatz college professor who claimed to be my "friend."  To me he was just a casual acquaintance, but he had once been the best friend boys and the toy industry ever had.
        
A.C. Gilbert made more than toys.  He manufactured future engineers and scientists.  For 50 years, toys made by the A.C. Gilbert Company stood above the crowd of cheap doo-dads and gewgaws peddled to make a quick buck.  Gilbert himself -- athlete, magician, toy tycoon, radio pioneer -- was an assemblage of diverse parts.  An American original, he was part Horatio Alger, part Jim Thorpe, and part P.T. Barnum.  Conservative and strait-laced, he nonetheless embraced the most progressive views on education.  In an age when learning was by rote, Gilbert encouraged children to make up their education as they went along.  He knew kids learned this way because he had been a boy in the truest sense, in our truest, bluest era.
      
Growing up in the 1890s, Gilbert came of age in a time almost devoid of irony or cynicism.  Concepts such as honor, duty, and success were touted in public on a daily basis and except for Mark Twain, few dared snigger or scoff.  Terms like “plucky” and “alert” were applied to boys like Gilbert without the slightest sarcasm.  Pride was still pride and heroes were not yet doomed to be toppled from their pedestals by scandal or skeletons in closets.  Stiffened by such moral fiber, Gilbert drove himself to become a mass of muscle in a slight frame.  From 1900 to 1910 he was America’s greatest amateur athlete.  A national champion collegiate wrestler, he also won sprints and hurdles, quarterbacked a college football team, and set world records in the pole vault.  But although he had devoutly followed the Protestant work ethic, Gilbert then thumbed his nose at it.

In 1909, shelving his M.D. from Yale University, he chose to practice boyhood instead of medicine.  While others went to work, he made a living by making and selling magic tricks.  Two years later, he invented the Erector set.  It was an instant success, allowing him to remain a boy in a businessman's body.  Throughout his life, he had a childlike delight in fun tempered by a business sense that made him a millionaire back when that term was still gilded.  While other toy makers were content to surrender their toys to the market's whims, Gilbert created the modern toy industry by selling fun all year round.  He promoted his products with a dizzying array of contests, monthly magazines, and engineering "institutes."  In sprawling full-page magazine adds filled with a homespun paternalism, Gilbert spoke to boys as if they were his friends.  And they wrote back, sending him some 300,000 letters a year, many of them signed "your loving son."
      
Between 1913 and 1966, Gilbert sold more than 30 million Erector sets, earning its nickname as “the world’s greatest toy.”  But it’s hard to consider it a toy.  During the late 1920s, the top-of-the-line Erector set, packed in a wooden box two-and-a-half feet square and eight inches thick, weighed 150 pounds, and made hundreds of models including a five-foot long zeppelin and a four-foot Hudson steam locomotive.  The set sold for $70, a month’s wages during the Depression.  But along with Erector Sets, A.C. Gilbert made science in a box.  He manufactured weather kits, astronomy kits, chemistry sets, microscopes, telescopes, and mini-labs that let kids play with physics, hydraulic engineering, mineralogy, sound, light, telegraphy, civil engineering, magnetism, even atomic energy.  Gilbert's toys allowed boys (and any girls who could get their brothers’ permission) to apprentice at an early age, trying on the world of science and industry to see how it fit.  But above all, A.C. Gilbert made memories.  Too many of these have passed on with their owners, but some still cause adults to behave rather strangely in their wake.

* * *

On a rainy summer Saturday, nearly 40 years after I got my Erector Set, I am standing outside a factory on a shady street in New Haven, Connecticut.  I don't often tour old factories and can't imagine why anyone would.  Upon learning about the tour of Erector Square, I expected perhaps a dozen people to show up.  I knew that Erector Sets had become collectibles in the 1980s, along with baseball cards, Pez dispensers, and anything else that smacked of Boomer nostalgia.  (A top-of-the-line Erector set from the 1920s can sell for $15,000).  Along with paying such prices, collectors will go to absurd lengths to get additional pieces that pertain to their collections.  Still, I couldn't imagine anyone shelling out $40 to tour an empty factory.  Yet when I enter the waiting room, more than 100 men and women have come out in the rain to learn more about Alfred Carleton Gilbert and his work.  An adjacent room is filled with displays -- Erector Set ads, a whirling Erector Ferris Wheel, a few old sets perfectly preserved in wooden boxes.  All around them, people shuffle along, talking low-tech.
      
"This was the Number 8, the one that built the zeppelin."
      
"I had that model over there, but without the motor.  I remember on Christmas my Dad and uncle played with it for about an hour before I got a chance."
      
"Check out that Ferris Wheel!"
      
After a few minutes, a tour guide divides us into two groups.  I leap into the first and am soon outside in a light drizzle looking up at Erector Square.  The three-story brick building looks like the backdrop for a Mafia movie.  Some walls are covered in ivy, others bear faded lettering from stenciled signs.  In recent years, our guide says, the building has been converted to studios and offices.  Dozens of artists work here, along with a graphic design firm, a yoga practice, a chiropractor, and a masseuse.  But the building still has the same name "and not a week goes by where we don't get a letter or a call from someone who remembers Mr. Gilbert."
      
Our tour group is an eclectic bunch.  Men in their 50's or 60's wear baseball caps with train logos.  Some insignias recall real trains -- Santa Fe or Union Pacific.  Another, American Flyer, was the toy train line Gilbert bought in 1938.  Grey-haired women beneath umbrellas clutch at each other's elbows as they tread the slippery sidewalk.  One young man carries a cell phone but the rest have the look of aging hobbyists, people more comfortable behind a model railroad layout than in a crowd.  Yet as they get to know each other, they find they have much in common.  Some worked for A.C. Gilbert.  "He was a wonderful man," a bent old woman remembers out loud.  "If it was your birthday, he'd come up to you, shake your hand, kiss you on the cheek.  Even if you were on the night shift.  We didn't have a union, you know.  We voted against it because Mr. Gilbert treated us so well."  Others know Gilbert second-hand but they know everything about him.  As we move into an open courtyard, the group exchanges "Did You Knows?" that sound as if they came from my Erector Set manual.
      
"Did you know that Mr. Gilbert set the world record for the pole vault?"
      
"Did you know that he won the Olympics in 1908?"
      
"Did you know that Mr. Gilbert once saved Christmas?”  That I certainly did not know.  I wait to hear how he performed this Grinch-defying feat, but as we circle the plant looking for an open door, the story dissolves into other Gilbert anecdotes.  How Mr. Gilbert ran Connecticut's first radio station.  How he owned a 600-acre estate he called Paradise.  How he hired a circus car and sent it around the country pitching his toys.  Just when I suspect I have heard the entirety of the man’s life, we find an entrance at the rear of the factory and duck in out of the rain.  Finally, we get to see something.  Our first stop – the Erector Square power plant.  Only a group raised with a nuts and bolts sense of how things work could marvel at this visit to a labyrinth of pipes, valves, and gauges.
      
"Look at those pipes!"
      
"And dials.  These days, that whole panel would be a digital readout."  Then we climb steps, our presence echoing through the brick stairway.  At the top of three cramped flights, we reach a walnut paneled office overlooking the courtyard.  The word spreads through the crowd.  This was "his office."  Cameras come out of tote bags.  People take photos of each other standing before Mr. Gilbert's fireplace or in the corner where Mr. Gilbert’s desk stood.  Someone asks where Mr. Gilbert kept his chinning bar.  "Did you know he held the world record for chin-ups?  And even when he was in his fifties, he used to chin himself at work."
       
After an hour, the tour concludes.  The second group is waiting its turn.  As we descend the stairs, the crowd's enthusiasm suggests that I've missed out on a piece of the puzzle called American childhood.  When I got my Erector Set in 1961, it already seemed dated, but for those a generation older, A.C. Gilbert's toys were an integral part of growing up.  In this one toy they found a model that still shapes the way they view work, industry, and America.  I found myself wondering whatever happened to Erector sets.  I asked myself why my children’s toys bear so little relation to reality.  Fantasy has always been an integral part of play, but have modern children, hurried toward adulthood, begun to cling to it a little too long?  Have adults decided that the modern world, with its manic pace and bewildering technology, is not fit to model for children?  Or is it just toys that seem dumber, more sinister, and totally at odds with the world around them?
      
Time changes the way we build and design.  Brick and stone surrender to fiberglass.  Pencil and paper become silicon chips.  Dials and meters morph into digital readouts.  Yet an industrial way of thinking survives in the computer age.  It lives on in the basements of Silicon Valley offices, where janitors keep the heat going.  It thrives in kitchens where a recipe for cornbread is still found in a cookbook, not on a Website.  It is housed in garages with walls lined from floor to rafters in tools.  And no matter how many Nintendo or Sega systems are sold this year, there remains a gang of older kids who remember simpler toys.  They recall the days when batteries were not included because they were not needed.  They remember a Christmas morning when time stood still just long enough for a single gift, a gift that turned out to be not a sweater or jacket but a toy, the one that topped the wish list.
      
Toys are not merely what we play with.  If we lend them our youth, piling out of bed in the morning to get our hands on them again, they construct a kingdom in our minds.  That kingdom lasts as long as we do.  Today’s most popular toys – even those for 13-year-olds -- are pure fantasy.  But time was when toys were mock-ups of the grown up world, preparing children for it day by day, doll by doll, model by model.  When a society is in sync with its toys, children are not afraid to grow up, and those who come of age with such toys can look back and see the person they've become in the toys they once loved.  If as Wordsworth said, "the child is father of the man," then the right toy is one of many mothers.  I had been amazed that 100 people showed up to tour an abandoned toy factory.  But the crowd made me realize how much toys matter, and how a visionary like A.C. Gilbert can shape generations.  How many thousands might have come here had they known that Erector Square was still around?
       
As we step back into the courtyard, I notice some railroad tracks behind the factory.  These are the tracks that used to carry Erector Sets to market.  With their Y-shaped switches and parallel rails, the tracks remind me of the H-O train set I had.  My set had electricity flowing through the tracks but this railroad is electrified from above.  A lattice of power lines and rusted steel girders bridge the rails.  Each piece of steel is notched, form fitted, and bolted in place.  And for a moment, I can imagine a lean, athletic man fresh out of Yale riding along these tracks toward Manhattan.  It's a half century before the world began to come apart.  In the fall of 1911, toys are luxuries, their purchase saved for the holidays, their purpose mere diversion.  But A.C. Gilbert, his head then full of hair, his eyes narrowed with determination to play and succeed, looks out the window.  He sees the girders overhead.  He wonders.