Prairie Advocate News


Discover rewarding casino experiences.

best online casinos

Please Don't Quote Me

By Caralee Aschenbrenner

PART II—

A little known fact in the chapters of Northwest Illinois history is that Whiteside County was a leading toy maker in the second decade and a few after of the twentieth century.

Dozens of kinds of toys were made in Sterling and Rock Falls and especially at Christmas when toy giving was a major feature. At one period there were five or six companies as mentioned last week, like Precision Products of Rock Falls and Toylander which was absorbed into Hustler Company, the most well-known of them all.

PDQ Me Logo
PDQ_HustlerToys_group.tif

Little has been researched about them except for Hustler and a couple of the output of Precision Products, two games of which were named games “Croquet” and “Roque,” boxed sets of indoor games one-sixth the size of similarly named games played outside. In “Roque” the “ball” was played off the boundary such as in pool or billiards.

Some of those games made in the yesteryear are on display at the Sterling-Rock Falls Historical Society beside the Dillon House Museum on east Third Street ... Under the Christmas tree and on the exhibit shelves. Have some yourself? Donate them for others to enjoy. Their hours are Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, 10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. and 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. and other times by announcement. Many other displays fill the former carriage house. Research is ongoing.

With the advent Clare Wetzel to the Hustler Company the business could almost be assured of success. His whimsical outlook and eye for design made the cut-outs of the jointed pull toy animals and human figures such fun for the children and later for adults to collect ... Arms and legs a-move made them companions for the boys and girls to show they were gifted or who chose them. They averaged about a dollar in cost. Hustler toys were sold all over the United States and went to “foreign lands,” as promotion said.

An assembly line-type of manufacture was organized that the men applied for cutting, sanding and affixing the metal parts where needed. Women did some putting together then lacquered them with brilliant, high quality coatings that were long lasting and durable for a toy that might be left outdoors in sand or a water puddle.

Wetzel contrived games, too. There was the “Aero Race,” as explained last week. One with children pitching horseshoes. The trainer and the elephant as described before, a five game set and more, each captivating for the expectant player. Just pulling the jointed wooden toys along the kitchen floor or the backyard sidewalk stirred the imagination of a positive-minded child allowing visions to grow until the circus came to town—or had just left.

Permanent displays of the Hustler toy were on constant exhibit at important department stores in Chicago, San Francisco and New York and elsewhere including smaller cities and small towns. A simple catalog had drawings of the item plus their size, the carton they were boxed in and some promotional blurb. The catalog urged that the displays did not have to take up much room but their colors and design drew attention to them. Each market had a special way they displayed the such as the Boston Store in Chicago had a clever child-size Ferris Wheel on which the toys were shown going ‘round and ‘round to wet the appetite of the buyer—or looker.

Source gives that there were either one hundred or forty models of Hustler toys so we’re not certain which but it does say (and agrees) that at least 50,000 were made of each unit and probably more ... Thousands went out from the factory each year, such as Floaty Duck, Betty Roll Duck, Sambo Hustler. There were tractors, racers, camels, horses, dogs, cats ... Every animal you could name with legs a-movin’ and heads bobbing. Wetzel designed dozes of clever toys, engineered them with his name on nearly every patent. The light weight toy fit in any little hand (they were poplar shipped from Arkansas) and lasted for many years.

The ultimate in Hustler creation, however, was unlike anything else ... A theatre. There were two of them, in fact. One went to Marshall Fields in Chicago and the other to Macy’s in New York City to be put in their street-side windows for the public to enjoy during the Christmas season.

The theatres had a drop curtain that was raised by an automatic mechanism that revealed “an act on stage” such as a kitten playing with a ball, a dog jumping, a boy riding in a cart and so forth. They moving ‘cross stage. Each act would last but a minute or less, the curtain would drop then rise again for the next appearance. It was American ingenuity at work.

For many years the United States had been a leader in toy making but gradually Germany took on that role and then, of course, the Orient.

PDQ_Toys_Tree.tif

The intricacies of the theatres could barely be imagined nor the expertise to put them into motion. They were the talk of the city and the place they were made! They were said to have cost $1,000 each, a fabulous sum in their day.

At the Chicago Historical Society in 1982 an exhibit featured Illinois-made toys of the period 1880-1980, a hundred years. There were three hundred toys, games, and books that had been conceived and manufactured in Chicago and northern Illinois, a part of which were Hustler toys of Sterling, Illinois. It was a very popular display and are some of the people who had worked at the company toured the Society to see their work of a few decades before.

A Sterling woman who had begun a collection of Hustler toys loaned some of her toys that had taken several years to discover. They were difficult to find and sometimes much increased in price than the near dollar they’d originally cost.

The object of the toys on exhibit was to study the function and role of the items in a child’s development plus how their manufacture affected industry and business in their regions of conception. It was divided into eight categories such as dolls, education, construction kits, etc. Then the histories and current status of each Hustler could compete with many rivals and was entered in several categories even the mechanical construction kits with “Bildkraft,” similar to the then Erector sets.

The Chicago Historical Society explained that for the exhibit the most important toys manufactured in their regions were chosen. They had to have good designs, high production values, be innovative and be promoted with imagination and distributed efficiently. It thus was recognition of what Hustler had been about in its community.

Community Forum

Hustler Toy Co. was listed in the City Directory from 1930 to 1939 at the West Third Street address though it had started in 1920-’21. Besides the Depression taking its toll on the purchase number of toys, toy makers in “foreign lands” had encroached on U.S. made playthings, tastes had changed, entertainment was rapidly being transformed. After 1939 the Hustler Company began manufacturing roller skates, a niche that it filled until 1974 when they were discontinued. Garage doors and hardware became its output although skateboards also were an item of manufacture by the Frantz Company, the factory reverting to its original name on the “modern” items. Some lawsuits cropped up with the skateboards, however, and their manufacture was dropped.

The Twin Cities’ reputation as the toy capitol of the Midwest dwindled and was lost. Most of us have known nothing about this chapter in Whiteside’s history but it was a major story at one time.

Merry Christmas toy lovers everywhere!

Google