Odds Ends June 2018 First Marx Meet Jumbo Toys we end the month catching up on some items. Playset magazine showed photos of the first Marx Meet. I will add a little information on it. Erwin Sell has found a small Italian toy soldier company called Jumbo Toys.
Odds Ends June 2018 First Marx Meet Jumbo Toys Marx Meet
Playset Magazine in their hundredth issue showed photos from the first Marx meet. Yours truly was there and as a dealer. I would like to give some background of the above photo. You will noticed in picture is a blue suitcase. I those days I would fill a suitcase with plastic bags of figures. People used to like go through the suitcase. In those days the hat I wore was my trademark. I still have it. The person with me is Bill McQuilken. He was one of my students at the time as I was teaching at business school. I used to hire students that had one of my classes to help at a show. The person n the baseball uniform is Tim Steinhoff.
I do not remember much of the show. I had hard time finding the place. Sales must have been good as I bought some of the Marx Koren War figures for my collection from Peter Fritz. He was in shock that I bought from him and thought he had under valued it. LOL.
We had two more Marx meets run by someone and I hope photos show up on those shows.
Odds Ends June 2018 First Marx Meet Jumbo Toys Jumbo Toys
The poses are 70 mm in a scale and well done with great deep detail.
I also received my 100th Anniversary Issue of Playset Magazine, and almost immediately came across the article on the first Marx Swap Meet. There were the photos of you in your younger days. I thought the article was one of the more interesting ones in this issue.
The people in attendance at that first small show were the pioneers in what became a series of much larger toy shows, which culminated in Chicago, Indiana, West Coast, East Coast, Gettysburg, and others, as well as a high quality, glossy, colorful hobby magazine. It’s all been great fun.
What year was the first Marx meet ? I started going to Toy /soldier shows in 1988.
The show was May 4,1986
The article in Playset Magazine says the date of the first “playset toy soldier show” was May 4, 1986, in High Bridge, New Jersey.
If that’s correct, Mark, then you pretty much got in on the groundfloor.
Thinking for a moment about that 1986 date makes me think that maybe Playset Magazine was referring to a purely “playset” show (as in “Marx Playsets”), whereas maybe in prior years there had been some generalized “toy soldier” shows, with the emphasis being upon metal toy soldiers, with plastic toy soldiers deemphasized. But I don’t know for sure if that interpretation is correct.
We had toy soldier shows before that but they were metal shows with plastic as an after thought. I did MFCA in the 70’s. Plastic was in the flea market and a little plastic at the main tables. The Marx Meet was the first true plastic show in the United States. Plastic Warrior Show which is in its 35th year started around 1987.
I see from the website of the Chicago Toy Soldier Show that the OTSN show premiered in 1980.
I guess the take-away is that which event is “first” depends on how you define the nature of the event.
Yes it is. As mention before the toy soldier shows were almost metal. OTSN had more plastic than MFCA.
They are advertising the Chicago Show as the 38th, which would make the first one in 1980. The first one I attended was before Play Set Magazine existed, I know this because I signed up to get the magazine at that show.