Less Work for Santa

Next Christmas, U.S. children will have to get along with 30-to-40% fewer toys than Santa Claus brought them last year. This was the sad conclusion of some 3,000 retail buyers who crowded together to stock up for Santa at the annual American Toy Fair in Manhattan last week.

There were two main reasons for the playroom gloom: 1) U.S. toymakers are busy making some 500 different war items; 2) war work or not, with no metal and rubber, less wood and paper, they cannot keep up peacetime production. But the Toy Fair showed that U.S. playthings will certainly not be as dreary as the toys British moppets had to take last Christmas, when a toy tank, crudely modeled of wood, with beer-bottle caps, stuck on for gun turrets, sold for a pound ($4).

The A. C. Gilbert Co., famed for its metal Erector sets, has invented reasonable facsimiles in wood and porcelain. Lionel Corp. has substituted fiberboard model railroad kits, with "realistic roadside accessories," for their streamlined electric trains. Other ersatz build-it-your-self sets ran the gamut from Flying Fortresses and anti-tank guns to farms complete with milking pails, and three-ring circuses complete with rolling lion cages. There were cardboard guns that rat-a-tat-tatted just as if they were made of metal, Para-Commando dolls (with ammunition and food kits), miniature WAVES, WAACs and Marines, wooden roller skates.

Brightest spot at the Toy Fair was the game business. Less harried by shortages than the toy industry, the game industry is doing more business than ever before. It is riding an Army & Navy boom: practically every serviceman's kit includes a pack of cards, a checker board or a backgammon set, and the U.S. Army recently ordered 1,500,000 dice at one clip.

But what really heartened the toy and game manufacturers was the place that WPB's Office of Civilian Supply recently assigned their $115,000,000 industry (TIME, March 1). Insisting that they "are needed for children's recreation and welfare," WPB allowed for 100% production (based on 1939 consumption) of nondurable toys, 70% for games.

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