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Wall Street History
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07/20/2007
Jack Odell...and the Case of the Lost Toys
[WSH returns Aug. 3]
Jack Odell died the other day, July 7, at the age of 87. Now you might be thinking, who was Jack Odell? Only the brains behind one of the great products of our time, Matchbox toys, that’s who.
Now your editor has a little personal history with these toy cars, trucks and tractors. I was born in Plainfield, NJ, 1958, and for the first seven years of my life, through first grade, lived in a modest little house on a quiet street. Our family then moved to Summit, NJ, in the summer of ’65, which proved to be good timing because the Plainfield riots hit two years later but I digress.
Back in those pre-1967 innocent times, though, I was allowed to walk down to Sam’s newspaper stand where I would pick up some baseball and rock ‘n’ roll cards. Sam’s also had Matchbox cars, which were my brother’s big thing, he being six years older and a car fanatic.
I was a pretty smart kid then, much brighter than I am today, and was really into rock music and the British Invasion since my Aunt Rose had bought us G.E. transistor radios. That thing was glued to my ear, 24/7, and tuned to the famous WABC-AM, which has absolutely nothing to do with Matchbox cars, I’ll admit.
Anyway, my brother had quite a collection of the toys, but one time when he was away at camp, I was playing with them and, according to legend, sold some of the cars to my brother’s friends. Well, actually, they say I was just giving them away, being a philanthropic sort even then.
Mom found out and was furious, so she took out her nail polish and put my brother’s initials on all of his remaining cars. Harry then came home from camp and was at first mad at me, thinking I had drawn all over them. Of course you all should know me well enough by now; I would never do that to a collectible. Eventually, Harry took it out on Mom. I think we had liver that evening as punishment, it being a Catholic thing as well in those days.
If you’re familiar with how valuable Matchbox cars became over the years, you’re probably thinking, no wonder the Trumbore boys had to work as hard as they did later on. They couldn’t afford to retire early! Some of the cars have seen their value soar from an initial purchase price of 50 cents back in the 60s to hundreds of dollars today, if you have one of the rarer ones in top condition. But in our case, it was like taking a Picasso or Renoir and scribbling “HT” right in the middle.
Alas, otherwise my brother and I had a great childhood, thanks to our parents providing a loving home, but geezuz .we just wish we had those cars in pristine condition today. [Harry is also still upset to this day he can’t find his Pete Rose rookie card, while I managed to retain most of mine.]
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As for Jack Odell, his is a classic story. Born to a working-class family in East London in 1920, Jack was expelled from school at age 13 and worked menial jobs for Simms Motor Units. Until the outbreak of the war, he also did small stuff such as operating a cinema projector. In other words, Jack Odell seemed to be going nowhere.
But the war proved to be the salvation for many in Britain. Jack joined the Royal Army Service Corps, and later the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He learned a trade, mechanic, and served for five years in North Africa and Italy, where he achieved the rank of sergeant and found himself in charge of maintenance of transport, including tanks.
When he was on leave, Jack Odell worked on Primus stoves and by the end of the war he had saved about $500, at which time he joined up with two fellow ex-servicemen, Leslie and Rodney Smith (not related) who had earlier formed Lesney Products.
Odell had wanted his own die-casting business, but when he couldn’t find a manufacturing facility, he found the Smiths in a bombed-out London pub called The Rifleman.
The trio set out to make die castings for the electrical and car industries, but in their downtime they thought about getting into toys. Odell came up with a miniature steamroller for his daughter and her show-and-tell at school and by the next year, 1953, Lesney had a production line for the little model. Coupled with a model state coach with a team of horses, and the subsequent coronation of Queen Elizabeth II upon the death of King George VI, Lesney, with the miniature horse-drawn golden coach had an instant hit. More than a million were sold for the equivalent of 40 cents.
Lesney then decided to branch out and package little cars, trucks and buses in the matchbox format and the rest is history. Odell, as the engineer, monitored the car industry and updated his models frequently to include details on everything from Land Rovers, to Jaguars, to London buses.
Lesney was still doing a bang-up business in manufacturing castings to industry, but by the time it went public in 1960 it was producing one million toy cars a week. Soon, the company was employing 6,000 and creating one million a day. “We produce more Rolls-Royces in a single day than the Rolls-Royce company has made in its entire history,” Odell told the New York Times in 1962.
75 percent of Lesney’s production went overseas, mostly Japan and the U.S., but by the 1970s, it was facing stiff competition from other brands such as Corgi and Mattel’s Hot Wheels. By 1982, Lesney declared bankruptcy, was acquired by Hong Kong’s Universal Toys, and then the Matchbox brand was picked up by Mattel in 1997; but Jack Odell was long gone, having kept much of his wealth despite the company’s issues.
As for the Smiths, Rodney emigrated to Australia early on in the business, while Leslie was the marketing brains behind Matchbox as Jack Odell focused on design.
In reading Leslie’s obituary from the London Times, Leslie having died in May, 2005, it’s said he was a leader in labor relations, which were among the best in the country.
“Faced with the fact that women made the best toymakers, but had to get their children to and from school, he organized a convoy of double-decker buses to enable every worker to pick up their children.”
And so we remember Matchbox toys and their designer, Jack Odell. But maybe my brother and I should track down his old friends to see if we can make a trade, like one of my multiple Mickey Mantle cards for a 1968 Mercedes Benz.
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Sources: London Times; Stephen Miller / Wall Street Journal; Douglas Martin / New York Times; Harry Trumbore
Wall Street History returns in two weeks.
Brian Trumbore
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