Visions of Dollars Dance in Their Heads

Christmas comes to a certain area of Manhattan in mid-March. There, in the New Yorker Hotel and in the 23rd Street showrooms near Broadway, most of the nation's 1,500 toymakers gathered last week to show off some 200,000 toys that will hit the U.S. market next Christmas season. From plush lions that roar to vinyl dolls that burp, the toys are designed to win the notoriously fickle attention of U.S. children and, toymakers hope, to hike this year's toy sales 20% to $1.3 billion. The prospect of all these toys makes visions of dollars dance in the heads of the executives of such companies as U.S. Steel, Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Union Carbide and Goodyear. This year the toy industry will lay out more than $600 million to buy raw materials from their firms and hundreds of others.

150,000 Lbs. of Hair. Chemical companies will cash in on the steady swing to plastic toys by selling upwards of $330 million worth of such plastics as polyethylene, polystyrene and vinyl. Another $120 million will go to papermakers for cartons, paper dolls and business forms. Steelmen will get $60 million worth of business, textile spinners $50 million, and the remaining $40 million will be disbursed among producers of everything from lumber and zinc to musical movements and tiny electrical motors. In 1964 the makers of construction materials and machine tools will also reap big benefits from the toymakers. Planning big increases in their capital outlays, like most of U.S. business, the toymen in 1964 will spend $250 million to expand and modernize their plants.

California's Mattel, Inc., the biggest toy company, will use more than 150,000 Ibs. of Saran filament for the hair of its bestselling and well-dressed Barbie Doll, another 5,000,000 midget phonograph records and needles-for its talking toys, as well as huge quantities of plastic, zinc and steel for its new line of bikes, tricycles and trucks; the line will have a battery-driven device called the VRROOM, which emits a roar like a motorcycle and is intended to catch every boy's ear.

Ideal Toy's new Smarty Bird, a battery-powered duck that walks about rolling its eyes and snapping its beak, alone will use up 600,000 Ibs. of plastics, 600 tons of steel, and enough corrugated cartons to cover 480 football fields. Chicago's Strombecker Corp. (midget racers, Tootsietoys) will consume more than 118 million tiny tires from Japan, and Los Angeles' Eldon Industries will use more than 300 tons of steel for the slender rails embedded in its plastic roadracing track.

In the Back. Toy sales in the nation's retail stores are expected to hit $1.68 billion this year, but that is no real measure of just how important toy departments actually are to U.S. retailers. The smart storekeeper gets much more out of toys than the $28 national average that is spent for each importuning child each year. He prices the popular items low, then sets up his toy department way to the back of his store, usually on a high floor. That way, parents must troop by counters laden with many other kinds of tempting merchandise before they get to the toys.

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