The Boston GlobeWEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25, 1996 MORRISVILLE, VT - As soon as he tidies up his shop, toy maker Ed Loewenton plans to toss his saxophone into the back seat of his Ford Taurus and head 26 miles to Montpelier to let off some steam. It's been a while since Loewenton - who describes himself as the "unpopular maverick of the toy business" - has had enough time to indulge in his favorite ritual of crashing local bar bands. That's to be expected, though. As owner of Elwood Turner Co., maker of hand-crafted wooden toys, he has not had a break from work since October. "We're more like a string quartet than an orchestra," said a visibly stiff Loewenton, 49, who threw out his back by loading 500 lbs. of his construction toy, Quarks, onto a delivery truck Friday. "Every person is important." Every person means Loewenton, one full-time helper and a few part-timers. With that crew he carves, assembles, dyes and packages seven types of wooden toys he designed, including a top, the colorful building set, a difficult peg game and a $100 "all terrain" pull duck. His most popular item - a smooth, ringed rattle carved from one solid piece of rock maple - retails for $17.95. He said he sold nearly 10,000 of those this year, but won't divulge the sales figures for his other toys. He does all this from a tiny, unmarked building that overlooks sprawling farm fields and snow-capped Mount Mansfield. It is heated only by a wood stove and doubles as his home, where he lives alone. For small toy makers like him, Christmas can be a blur of production, especially since he does not have the space to hold much inventory. "Quarks is an inventory manager's nightmare," he said referring to the toy that comes in sets of 64 to 202 pieces. "You're always running out of something. This past week, day and night, all I was doing was dyeing parts. With all that, somehow I got it out by Friday." Wood shavings and empty boxes littered the floor of his basement shop as Loewenton and a helper swept up last weekend. His car out front was still buried in snow that fell several days before. Unopened mail and Christmas cards were heaped in a pile on a worktable. "I haven't been out in a long time," he said wearily. Loewenton opened his shop, which is closed to the public, 15 years ago after he moved from Lynn, Mass. to Vermont in search of "a clean place and nice people." Shortly thereafter, he eliminated his wooden kitchen products line and in 1986 limited his business strictly to designing toys, applying philosophies he picked up as a graduate student in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania 27 years ago. "I haven't forgotten in the least what it's like to be a kid and have toys," he said. "Much of the toy industry is so cynical, and the stuff they produce is so unnecessary. That's why my company makes such a small line of toys. A good toy allows the child to contribute his or her own effort and creativity. There's no lasting attachment otherwise and you end up with a living room full of broken plastic toys." It's statements like that, Loewenton said, that have earned him the reputation in the mainstream market as a "crotchety" toy maker. Distrustful of widely-used paints and polishes slapped on other toys, Loewenton, also a former chemistry major, has been known to track down the testers of his dyes to personally determine the safety of their composition. The wood he uses comes from "appropriate" and environmentally-safe sources, he claims. His love of toy making grew from a whittling pastime he picked up between playing sets in a rock band. His first success was the rattle - which he promises to eat "ground up and baked in bread" if one comes back defective. After an unsuccessful attempt at direct mailing, Loewenton has kept to small retailers and catalogs such as Rivertown, TCToy, and the Natural Baby Catalog. Jane Martin, owner of Natural Baby in Trenton, N.J., has sold Loewenton's rattles for five years and said they fulfill her customers' desire for "health, safety, and basic beauty" in toys. "In the mind of my customers, plastic toys are too bright in color and are designed to draw the baby out o his beautiful, heavenly world into our technological world," she said. "These rattles are very safe. They have no toxic finish and they make an earthy, clunky sound." And another thing, she said -- they sell. Reprinted with permission from The Boston Globe (c) Dec. 25, 1996 |