Into the Orbit

No one heard the beeps of the Soviet Sputnik more clearly last week than U.S. toymakers, who lost no time blasting off on an 18,000-m.p.h. orbit all their own. Looking ahead to Christmas, the toymen were already well-stocked with an arsenal of celestial hardware. They quickly launched a crash program to unwrap the stuff. "The second I heard about the Russian satellite," said one somber-voiced toyman, "I knew we had to move fast."

Big mail-order houses and retailers everywhere happily hurled themselves into space. Advertising a $5.89 telescope in its new winter catalogue. Montgomery Ward urged: "Be an earth satellite observer." Spiegel's rocketed away with a "Super Satellite Station" for $3.98. Sears, Roebuck had a $6.37 "Radar Rocket Cannon,'' along with dozens of other fearsome armaments, and practically everyone wanted Tigrett Industries' $20 "Golden Sonic,'' a flying rocket ship powered only by a high-pitched whistle.

But nobody--not even Gimbels--could quite match the Sputnik sense of Manhattan's Macy's. where space sales were up 1.000% within a week. Rushed to the store by cargo planes and taxicabs, some 10,000 satellite balloons, ray guns and missile trackers were crammed into a new display area manned by perspiring salesmen in space suits and helmets. Pervading all was a real-live recording of the Red Sputnik's throaty beeps.

As for the manufacturers, Manhattan's

Ideal Toy Corp. thundered into round-the-clock production with a sleek new $4.98 "Satellite Launcher/' complete with rotating radar tracking station, which can fire four plastic disks 75 ft. into space. Another gadget: a $7.98 "Sky Sweeper Truck." which beams searchlight silhouettes of jet planes against a wall, shoots them down with two "Nike" rockets. In seven days Ideal shipped out 100,000 Satellite Launchers, another 50,000 Sky Sweeper trucks. "This may be a propaganda blow to the U.S.," cried an Ideal executive. "But for us--boy, oh, boy."

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