[Music] you're watching lmcc [Music] welcome to west halcome memories my name is pam myers and i volunteer with the westonka history museum today i'm interviewing ron paulie who worked in product design for tonka toys right here in town uh welcome ron thank you you were in product design for talking tell me how you got into product design kind of by accident uh in part one we we finished up with i bernie melchesky i had gone to stout and decided to go a different route stout state college bernie malchesky who was charlie groshan's brother-in-law was putting a forced air heating system into our house to replace the parlor stove at the jungle's parlor stove that we had keep that big farmhouse warm and in conversations with him i mentioned that i had been exposed to sheet metal at stout and he suggested that i go to dunwoody and take up sheet metal work which by the way was what his brother-in-law had done he went to dunwood he took up sheet metal work and he charlie groshan and ended up working for markson company a heating contractor here in mound so i applied it and started at dunwoody in 1961. and how did you get connected with conga well i got a job a part-time job on saturdays and holidays off from when i was going to school with a fella by the name of bill ishe who had a little sheet metal shop south of cologne on the road that goes to bell plain and he had a contract with farmhand they made farm equipment he had a contract with them to make dust collectors for a feed mixer that they were building up in green isle arlington and so i wasn't the only employee he had but i'd go over there and help him he'd get a order of maybe for a dozen or a couple dozen of these dust collectors and i would uh help him finish the order but while i was there uh if i'd finish early then i would use a sheet metal shop to make a couple of model of toys but when i was a child i was already into redesigning stuff so for instance this is a 19 this dump truck came out out in 64. but it only had a single set of wheels here and i had on a previous tonka toy i had put tandem wheels on it but i used erector set pieces to put the tandems on it and i painted the white sidewalls on it and stuff so i'm 12 years older so i'm starting to redesign this stuff because i didn't like exactly the way tonka had done it well there used to be a dump on the west side of mound where the intersection of 44 meets with 110 there's a housing development there now but i and another friend of mine would come down once in a while on our bicycles and go and pick out tires or or parts so we could build toys out of wood or whatever but this originally was a cab meant to pull an allied van trailer but again i didn't particularly care for the way it came with just one set of wheels here so i used erector set pieces to lengthen the frame so i'm i was doing that like i said when i was 12 13 years old i see i have heard you tell a story about where you were working when you were hired by tonka you want to tell that story well i was i had to go to one of the requirements was you had to go to dunwoody to get into sheet metal workers local 34 which by the way charlie grossian belonged to also but i was working on the convention hall addition to the minneapolis auditorium in 1964 which was taken down and replaced by the big convention hall that's there now so a big lorraine 65-ton lorraine truck crane came on the job site and it just blew me away it had double steering front axles which today is very common but back then that was that was something new so my dad drove school bus down here for vern christensen and i told him i said stop a tonka toys and get me 10 mighty tonka wheels so i can make a model of this truck crane so he stopped and ended up talking to charlie grosham and charlie gross he told charlie groshan about a toy semi model i had made and uh earth mover and charlie wanted to see those so my father in october 64 took those two models to into charlie groshan and charlie said if your son wants to do that for a living have come in some saturday which i did in november and i started as the fourth product design model maker that charlie had hired the first one was lee file sticker and then it was i'm not sure it was ted zimakowski who was the supervisor of our group and johnny danielson so i was the fourth person you had a number of uh different job responsibilities early on as i recall as well it wasn't all toys was it tonka couldn't keep the factory going all year round uh building toys uh because of the sales volume so unbeknownst to me in 1964 they had bought a barbecue grill business out of chicago male manufacturing that was a perfect fit for off season so when you're basically done [Music] building toys for the peak christmas season you know you can build barbecues for spring i see you know in summer so it was a perfect fit well i didn't know that when i took the job and i got stuck designing and redesigning and making barbecue grill cabinets and everything else and i've got a catalog i can show you and i was complaining about it and lee file sticker said well i i said i wouldn't have taken a job if that's all i was going to do and lee says well that's the only reason charlie hired you if you look over my shoulder there's a jeep and the only toy i got to work on was to design the snow plow for the front of that jeep wrecker charlie and file sticker worked on this and came out with this mighty dump in 1964. and 65 that crawler crane clamshell crane well charlie says we should have a loader front end loader to go with that well when i was a kid nylon made a front end loader that worked with our regular sized dump truck and their regular size dump truck so it was an expensive to manufacture it was relatively expensive because it was kind of like a forklift it had big wheels in the front and small wheels in the back that would steer and so there's a lot of the steering wheel was right here and then loader arms so there's a lot of linkage and stuff a lot of parts so we knew that making a loader mighty size would be an issue so what we did was we got literature from caterpillar and all the other companies that made front end loaders but one of them huff h-o-u-g-h they had a tie-in i believe with international harvester came out with this new front-end loader which was unique then and is still unique because if you look at front-end loaders today for instance the operator sits with with the motor and only the front axle rotates with the loader arms okay this was different the operator sits with the loader arms so that right away we knew that's the toy we needed to cut or the real loader we needed to copy no steering mechanism all it is basically is you put one hand on the cab roof and the other on the motor and you've got your steering so vern peterson was when i started there was a wood model maker and paul bossard was the draftsman and tool engineer so there were six of us in that department at that point in time so what we did is we started vern peterson and i kind of collaborated and we made a full-size wood model that would work with the mighty dump and then which was typical after that you would i as soon as sales and marketing everybody was happy with the concept then it was my job to take that wood model and turn it into metal that same year we decided also to make a mighty car carrier that started as a wood model and then when we got the approval for that then i converted that into a metal working toy like i said that was a standard way of developing a toy you start with a wood model and and then turn it into a metal now early on i got the reputation they called me the boilerplate kit because i tended to use heavier metal than the other three guys and the reason being is i would like that front end loader i had to redesign many of those parts quite a few times because i took it home and dug in the garden with it or the flower bed and pushed on it and kind of tried to break it you know and like i said something had been then i'd have to redesign and put thicker metal on it or something like that which is kind of where that boilerplate idea came from that's a great nickname to have means you were making toys that lasted i wonder if there were if there were things that you liked most about your job and things that you liked least not going back to the barbecue you know the barbecue grill business i mean i didn't hate it as as such but i it was a big disappointment that i was stuck with that as far as making toys because i i joined make designing and making the cabinets uh the second year and 60 the same year that i designed the loader i designed a pedestal framework with four legs out and on top that use a square tube for the pedestal so you can mount a round barbecue grill on it or our version of a weber kettle which was a boxy shape thing and i got a pat for that and so what did you like most about your job well i was a big kid i guess playing with toys i redesigned them when i was young and so you know i i just i wanted to whenever charlie come down and say okay we need a mighty whatever i wanted to do it and he gave okay so like i said he was happy with the loader and he was happy with the barbecue so looking over my shoulder i was the designer of the mighty mixer the designer or the twin boom wrecker that i that didn't start as a wooden model that i just went from scratch with that and then the mighty dozer that's around the corner we called it a t9 because it was actually a copy of that d9 caterpillar so i always tried to mimic as close as possible the real thing and the real thing that you were mimicking did it was it a particular manufacturer or it just depended on the vehicle that you were working on with the exception of that loader and the mighty dozer being a direct copy of the caterpillar d9 no it was just kind of generic you know trying to reference what's on the road what lessons do you think your work life taught you patience a lot of patience because there are always people and maybe i'm one of them i'm not going to who think they're smarter than you are or have better ideas than you do or whatever and like i said they called me the boilerplate kid and you know heavier metal aggravated the cost of the toy you know material wise and depending on how i configured some of the parts it maybe aggravated the price of the the dye or whatever or took more dyes to you know it impacted the the potential selling price of the toy but the other thing i did was i spent a lot of time down in sub-assembly with the women that were putting together the unpainted parts i spent a lot of time in final assembly with the women that were putting together and finishing the painted parts putting toys on and everything one of the things i would do is when we came out with a new toy and typically we would run with maybe try to run a thousand fifteen hundred toys to debug the tooling and then also debug the fixtures or figure out what fixtures we needed to help assemble the things so one of the things i always did and the women that finally assembly the lead ladies and stuff they really they i they liked me because what i would do contrary to my cohorts i'd go up there and the tables had a conveyor belt that ran down the middle and every you know so many inches there was a stripe okay so a woman would do her thing assemble her part and then put it down there and then it would move here and that woman would grab it and do her thing so we could vary the speed of that belt depending on how long it took to do the slowest operation for instance and then at the end of the belt a gal would fold up the box or whatever and put the toy in it so what i would typically do is i would start at that first position and i would sit there and with the person that was going to have to do that and i would sit there and put them together and okay you can't feel comfortable now trying it yourself yeah okay so then i'd look over her shoulder and then when she was satisfied then i'd move to the next position perfect and then ultimately i'd be down there putting it in the box and i i mean and if there was a problem on the production line down the road and even with toys that i didn't necessarily design a lot of times i get calls from the lead lady or one of the sure because they had more gals on the line to come up there and i would help them you know they could always count on me terrific it's my understanding that at the height of tonka that that there were three shifts going on yeah it was going 24 hours a day and these ladies came from nearby farms and well when i would be i grew up in saint bonnie i went to the catholic school well it was a two-story red brick building that was tore down it's a parking lot now and replaced by the one that's a one-story school that's across from a ballpark but when i was going home from school the carloads of women would be going down 110 in st bonnie to go down the mountain for for the second shift and they'd come from waconia or cologne norwood young america new germany winstead i mean from all over and typically in the early days you know like when i was just a kid they were primarily from the western side a mound and probably and a heck of a lot of them were farm wives they were augmenting the income for for their husbands farm work it must have made quite a difference in downtown mount i know that that was before you you were a kid at the time but it must have made quite a difference to have all those folk coming into town well we had a few grocery stores not just one and people who would do the grocery shopping here you know and there were some bars and some of the people not the not the women but some of the guys you know be at the legion club or whatever so i mean or get their hair done or get a haircut or whatever whatever so i mean it there was an imp they impacted the business community involved for sure in a positive way yeah i understand there were even several uh car dealerships yes yeah one was directly across from the catholic church on 110 and the other one was torn down to expand the tonka toy plant that's across the street over there so when they moved out of town that that again must have impacted the community dramatically generally speaking when we were up to speed in summer you know you'd have roughly 1500 people wow yeah all of a sudden they disappear for sure and then when they left mild we also had the facility down in spring park which used to be the jr clark building so that was warehouse space and a little part of it was set up to remanufacture or fix the screwed up toys that were coming from warriors mexico which were the tiny tonka toys that started you know the tiny tonka toys were labor-intensive and the mighty dump was material intensive you know so it almost take took as much fiddling to do a little tiny tonka dump as the the mighty dump so in 81 82 i mean they built this plant juarez and moved all the tiny tonka toys down there well there was always some rumbling about high taxes and and the cost of labor here in mound in in minnesota and you know there was talk a few years earlier in the 70s every once in a while you'd hear something about maybe going to alabama or someplace down south where it's cheaper to make toys and nothing really came of it you know just once in a while you'd hear something but then all of a sudden they announced they're going to build a plant wars mexico in 1981 and then when that was done the tiny talkers went down there so then the next thing well across the river is el paso texas well let's move the rest of the manufacturing down there and if you look at the that plant across the street taka never thought that they would get as big as they did the transformer uh that's switch station that sits where it is now used to sit right where the western end of the tonka plot was and the kind of straight across from the the road that came up to the museum here was the car dealership that got wiped out you know but generally there were homes and that was a little incline going up the hill well the last edition was the biggest addition which was the press room and there was a big concrete ramp to get from the elevation in the press room up to sub-assembly and sub-assembly prior to that last addition was the press room and sub-assembly and etc so you had elevation changes and you were pinched between that railroad track in the road and so the the way material flowed through the plant wasn't ideal that so the head of engineering when they realized we're going to pull out a mound they laid out a plant that you know you put raw materials in one end and finished materials come out of the other and you know a good idea you know from a manufacturing point of view but farrah fawcett jeans had a sewing plant el paso and a warehouse across the street from where the plant was went up for sale oh we managements couldn't buy that place fast enough because we can get that cheap labor six months or so sooner well to back up just a little bit every spring for quite a few years before tucker left mound the union organizers would be running back and forth and out the street trying to talk to employees coming out after their day shift to unionize that plan that went on for quite a few years they and like towards the end instead of just people coming from the west side of mound people started coming out from minneapolis you know to work north and south the suburbs and stuff and they had a different outlook on life and there was a the last union election the tool room went to union and the plant the tool makers that would maintain the dyes and molds and stuff like that and the plant almost went union the family at that point that was the official end of the tonka family where management all the workers seemed like hey we're in this all together so that's one that really started picking up on we got to get out of here and get cheaper labor and taxes yeah i remember uh in looking at the tonka company newsletters how much that felt like family that feeling of family came through there were articles about the members of the family and calling uh members of the workforce everybody knew everybody's first name and all of that well so-and-so's daughter got married or so-and-so's daughter grant or son graduated or what whatever those newsletters are full of those stories you know newsletters about individuals and write-ups about individuals that worked within the system i'm written up you know on one of them but doris lego was the receptionist at the main door and one day i didn't come to work she called the house and wanted to know if i was okay perfect christmas parties we'd have christmas parties the employees would bring their kids and then they'd have tables set up with not mighty talkers on them but you know taco toys take you know they they could take whatever toy they wanted you know and we'd have a christmas you know a luncheon and stuff like that it it was really like family you know also like in final assembly especially and there was there was some of that in sub-assembly it was not uncommon to have two or three generations of women working in final assembly you didn't have to really be pounding on the desk or the workbench or anything to get that second or third generation to work mother or grandmother didn't want you to create a bad name for the family you know so we had built-in supervisors and didn't have to pay for them you know my son's a hard worker or my daughter or whatever i mean it just it was family it's just hard to explain that but it was family yeah it certainly came through in the newsletters even though i never got a chance to work there uh when i first came to the community in 1981 i thought everyone in town had worked at tonka at one point or another because i would run into all kinds of people who who you know during their break from school or during summer vacation and their parents as well one of the priests we had stan made father stan made her grew up on 110 on a farm between here in saint bonnie and he worked at tonka toys in the summer a lot it was common for a lot of these people to when we were really pushing it to get the toys out for christmas it was common for people going to college to work a summer job here you've talked a number of you've mentioned a number of the toys that you designed that they produced i wonder uh what you would say you were most proud of in that part of your work life a couple ways to look at i designed a a road grader that never went into production that i was really proud of and it never went into production because i didn't design it the way charlie groshan scribbled on a piece of paper and gave me verbal instructions nice to design it but set that aside uh and would have been a fantastic road grader mighty road grader the mighty front end loader which i did designed back in 19 worked on in 66 and it came out in 67. i'm the most proud of that and one of the reasons is because it was tough and enduring but the and the mighty line is really what helped tonka toys financially the mighty dump was the most popular toy i wish i had sales numbers for all the years but i believe in i think it was 1971 they sold 500 000 mighty dump trucks oh my oh and the natural the toy that would work well with that they sold 375 000 mighty front end loaders so those two toys were the most by far the most popular mighties and and brought in a lot of cash into the company well i wonder if there's uh if there's something else that you thought we would talk about today about tonka when the original three guys you know started talk mount metal craft they had intended to make metal hand garden tools and a metal necktie rack like is up in that cabinet and the company that was down in spring park in that void space it's now a void space in the jr clark building which originally was kind of a lumber yard kind of thing and they made a made some wooden toys 1946 steel was hard to come by yet and they made a steam shovel out of wood using the wood that would typically have been used to design ammunition boxes and then the metal boom and the shovel and bucket part of that fella that used to work for them at that period of time was stopped in here a couple years ago and he said one of his jobs was to take metal meat cans and cut the tops off and the bottoms off and then cut it down the middle and flatten it out so they could get those metal parts out of that well in 1985 then metal was easier to come by and they redesigned it and the the both the shovel part using good steel and they came out with a crawl uh um clam shell shovel and with a metal cab and 47 those three guys from mount metal craft and the principles from streeter got together over a bar or someplace i don't know and decided the heck what streeter decided to heck with toys and streeter by the way stayed in business and street or star fixtures and stuff like that that's in that family line but tonka or mon metal craft decided to make toys and so tonka toys logo said mount metal craft and above it's the waves on lake minnetonka and then there are three birds gulls flying over the word tonka toys which represent the three original guys that started mountain mental craft in 1969 the food and drug administration i'm pretty sure i'm correct on this story but the food and drug administration was given the task of coming up with toy safety regulations you know lead in paint sharp edges there were toys typically sold in the five and dimes that were made out of styrene and if you stepped on them all of a sudden it shattered and i mean you could pull the wheels off the axles i mean it was bad news so the government enough people pushed the government hey we've got to do something about this well companies like fisher price and play school hasbro and that sat with john preston who was the fella from an engineer from england that was one of the people charged with coming up with toy safety regulations so they they came up with a draft of toy safety regulations now tonka toys nyland buddy l uh structure i mean these steel basically we were steel truck guys sharp edges and you know we the companies sat back and just let the preschool people with the plastic and stuff like fisher price you know a good company developed these regulations so then they came out so so then they sent me down to washington to sit in on this meeting because i was you know i was a gung-ho person preaching to build toys that don't fall apart and stuff like that ray freegard who we hired in later years from detroit work for the automakers he was a clay modeler he'd model parts inside the car or whatever taillights or whatever that's what his function was and he made a comment a few years ago which kind of made me happy and surprised me he's he said when he came to work in his term working at tonka toys i was the conscience of the department i mean that's something to be quite proud of yeah but i was i'd kick people off once in a while but that's not good enough you know for sure but they good for you but they sent me down to washington because i had that reputation i the older fella from fisher price in charge of quality control and and basically these were quality control managers that from the companies that worked on sure we talked back and forth so okay so especially if a fella from fisher price you guys build good toys you know and and safe toys we're really after the five and dime guys that are peddling junk you know blah blah blah so i came back home with a set of regulations we had about a 115 toys or something like that in the line so in r d and different manufacturing types quality control people and stuff we split up into teams and i because i was a designer i could not go and test anything i ever developed because i'd be prejudiced so i mean god bless management you know they wanted this as fair as possible so we went through and came back the different groups and i had a group you know and anyway we came back sat down on the long table and the executives was there charlie groshan was down on one end of this loan table i was at the other end and john hastings i believe it was who was our materials expert in r d at that point i think he went through most of the toys i had designed only a handful of toys passed those regulations really right the ones that had the least uh rework required or redesigned required were the toys i worked on perfect and john and john hastings is going over what's wrong with the mighty lord or what's wrong with the you know blah blah blah and charlie leaned over like that and a great big smile on his face you know perfect you know so even though he and i butted heads once in a while like just my stubborn german attitude or whatever and charlie was a stubborn german but i was 23 years old and it was april that first year in 1965 and charlie came down which he did to oversee what was going on and he didn't like the design of a certain barbecue par grill part that i had designed from a die standpoint okay so he's sitting there and scribbling on a piece of paper alternate part design i'm just 23 year old snot-nosed kid that they're working in the fourth month versus the lead file sticker who had been there for years and zibakowski so the the layout of the department was two workbenches i was facing file sticker he was facing me and then a space about like this and johnny danielson and ted zumakowski facing each other and so charlie is scribbling and i shot down his design and then another one and this kept up for almost a half an hour i see and i kind of looked up at file sticker and file sticker is just and then i and charlie still he still got his head down and he's scribbling and then i turned around and i looked at zubatkowski who was facing me and and johnny danielson he's in the and like file sticker i mean these guys are file sticker for sure are old enough to be my father okay and so johnny daniels and god bless him he's sitting there his cheeks are red as a beat he's got his hand over his mouth tears are rolling down his cheeks he's doing everything he can to keep from letting charlie know that he's laughing you know and after about a half an hour charlie got ticked off and and walked out and slammed the door behind him because he couldn't come up with a better idea that was kind of the and he hired me in the first place but that was the kind of the relationship we had i mean he he respected what i did but he also didn't like the idea when i you know anyway i talked about this road grader earlier charlie came down he said we need a mighty road grader and he came right up to me because i he knew i wanted to do the mighties and stuff and i typically had done a decent job with that so he says take the mighty loader he scribbles on a piece of paper he said take the mighty loader take the loader arms off of it and build a frame out in front of it and you know that'll be the new mighty grader and i thought okay so then he left and i thought what a stupid idea and dumb looking road grader so what did i do i reverted back to i got a picture of a real caterpillar road grader what i did is i started laying out the real caterpillar road grader starting with the mighty motor and chassis part that was it and then building from there and a cab and all that good stuff well we made part drawings of every metal part we got tooling quotes for every metal part and it it was all metal and there were no new molds required just steel stamping dies and we were ready to to give the jobs out and charlie came down and he killed it i almost quit my job over that and i ted zimakowski who was the supervisor and said i went to ted i said i'm going to go up and talk to charlie i said it's just not right that we're not going to make that road greater he said ron i wouldn't do that if i was you he said i've been bugging charlie about it and sales and marketing they've been bugging charlie about it he said you know if you go up there and bug him about it he's liable to fire you on the spot he's so hot under the collar so i gave up so the next year he comes down he walks past my workbench and he goes to lee file sticker the first guy he had hired scribbles the same bloody thing out an idea and that's the road grader that tonka built but there is that on the side there's a like a a wing and on my road grader i had designed that wing because it back in the day hennepin county was running around here on 110 in different places with road graders that had a big v plow in the front some days but they always had this wing on the side that would plop down so they could widen the road and stuff but charlie liked the wing idea so he had lee foul sticker put one on his road grader so that was the only concession to my original road grader that he made well i i really appreciate your spending time with us today thanks for telling us about your adventures at tonka you're welcome [Music]