Creative Playthings employees, Jean Hoffman (left) and Dorothy Snyder (right) fix blemishes in wood used to create outdoor swing sets. Both women were residents of Herndon, Northumberland County, Pennsylvania.
The following article appeared in the Sunbury Daily Item, December 31, 1989, describing the history of the Creative Playthings firm:
FIRM GOES FROM CLASSROOM TO BACKYARD
OUTDOOR SWING AND GYM ARE MAINSTAY AT CREATIVE PLAYTHINGS
By Richard Vanslavie, staff reporter
HERNDON — About 20 years ago, catalogs promoting Creative Playthings products listed dozens of educational toys for children.
Since then, the company has added to its name and trimmed its product line. The mainstay of sales today is its outdoor swing and gym set.
The new focus at Creative Playthings-Swing design is the result of changes in company ownership and changes in demand.
The company has weathered the changes and maintained its leadership in the competitive area of specialized child-related toys.
Creative Playthings began operations in 1951 in Milton and contracted much of its work for wooden items to the American Novelty Company, which had been making toys in Herndon since 1919.
Creative Playthings purchased American Novelty in 1962. In 1966, Gabriel Industries, a subsidiary of CBS, bought the entire operation from Creative Playthings. Then, in 1986, the company was sold to Swing Design of Framingham, Massachusetts.
Under CBS, Creative Playthings began manufacturing a small line of swing sets in 1982. It was a leading competitor of Swing Design.
One long-time employee, Robert Hollenbach of Herndon R. D., began working at American Novelty in 1947.
Back then, Hollenbach was sanding wooden tool boxes, making kitchen carving boards and gluing film negative boxes. They were only a few of the many wooden products coming out of the plant.
Workers in those day had to hand-load wood into a drying kiln. “We used an old Model A to move lumber before there were fork lifts,” Hollenbach said.
Today, two years away from retirement, Hollenbach is a foreman at the same plant, supervising a staff that uses modern equipment and is far removed from the wooden boxes and cutting boards that Hollenbach once fashioned.
“Back then we were making things like drying boards for laboratories and a gas apparatus for scientific companies. We even made vehicle ramps that the state police use for weighing purposes,” said the 60-year-old Hollenbach.
Creative Playthings experienced one of its greatest growth periods during the 1960s, according to production manager Bob Swartzlander.
Swartzlander held two summer jobs at the plant and began working there full-time in 1954. The 54-year-old Dalmatia resident has worked there 35 years.
Swartzlander said Creative Playthings once listed about 1,800 different items. Many were not produced at the Herndon plant, especially those articles that were not made of wood.
“Some items came from Germany and were repackaged with the Creative Playthings label,” Swartzlander said.
During the early years and the early 1970s, the company relied on a unique marketing strategy — selling their toys exclusively through catalogs. For a time, it was the only means by which the company sold its products, Swartzlander said.
“The catalogs were sent to schools, nurseries, institutions and homes. In the 1960s, that was the main method of marketing,” he said.
For two or three years, catalogs were mailed from Herndon, and around 1961, the company began mailing the catalogs from a site in New Jersey.
“In the Sixties it was just catalogs and mail orders. It was the biggest (toy) company then selling through catalogs. They used to mail out six or seven catalogs to 20 million addresses each year,” Hollenbach said.
Following the sale to CBS, the factory added new toys to its product line, including wooden trucks, planes, steam rollers, tables and chairs, rattles, crib toys, trains, trailers, wooden dominoes, music boxes and puzzles. The mainstay toys, however, were hardwood building blocks, a mini-kitchen and in indoor gym, Hollenbach recalled.
“For about 20 years we made those three items. One year we made about 60,000 indoor gyms. It’s what made us, about 1971 or 1972,” Hollenbach remarked. With a philosophy that stresses education and learning, the Creative Playthings product line enjoyed a period of new prosperity during the 1960s as a result of the federally funded Head Start program. A variety of the company’s educational product wound up in classrooms across the nation, Swartzlander said.
When funding for the federal program declined, so did the overall demand for many of the company’s educational toys, Swartzlander said. Individuals had less money to spend on toys when Head Start funding declined, he said.
The early 1970s also marked the end of the company’s emphasis on catalog sales, he said. “It made its cycle,” he said.
Further, he said, “There was a trend where there was no demand for wood. Plastic is what ruined us.”
The company soon established a sales force of about 23 people and opened four stored, in New Nork, Philadelphia, Chicago and California. The change in philosophy also resulted in more that 3,000 stores eventually selling products with the Creative Playthings name, Swartzlander said. Most of the 3,000 stores selling the Creative Playthings line were listed in an advertisement of a special issue of Life magazine devoted entirely to children.
A few thousand swing sets were produced annually when CBS first began making swing sets, said Hollenbach. Following the purchase by Swing Design, the figure grew tremendously. “In 1989 we made about 30,000 sets, and about 25,000 in 1988,” he said.
“We switched from classrooms to backyards,” Swartzlander said.
The company now produces about 30 different styles of swing sets, keeping nearly 100 workers busy.
The sales force has been reduced to about four persons who spend much of their time at trade shows. The swing sets also are featured in the catalogs of major retailers such as sears and J. C. Penney, Swartzlander said.
As far as their own catalogs are concerned, the company only sends out a few these days, he said.
It was catalogs, however, that got the Creative Playthings name in American homes.
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News article & photo from Newspapers.com.
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