Every small town has its
characters, but one magnetic personality in Smethport, Pa., (pop. 1,684), is
famous nationwide for evoking smiles for more than half a century. Wooly Willy
is a shifty character full of disguises and funny faces. Sometimes he's bald,
sometimes bushy-haired. He might wear a mohawk with a mustache, a flattop with
muttonchops, or a ponytail and an eye patch. The Wooly Willy character has
entertained millions of children since 1955 when Jim Herzog conceived the idea
for the toy while grinding magnets at his family's toy-making business,
Smethport Specialty Co. "The ends of the magnet had to be run across a
grinding wheel to make them level and it created a lot of dust," recalls
Herzog, 81, of Smethport. "I came in and ground the magnets one day and
all of a sudden it came to me. I put a pile of dust on a piece of cardboard and
used magnets to play around with it." Herzog envisioned a simple toy that
could be made by encasing magnetic powder in a clear plastic package atop a
cardboard picture. Kids could use a magnetic wand to pick up the powder and
draw details on the picture. "It's one of those ideas that's small, but in
the end it's big," says Herzog, the proud inventor of Wooly Willy.
"What's unusual is that the packaging became the product, so it made
manufacturing cheap." The first Wooly Willies, drawn by artist Leonard
Mackowski, were printed one at a time on yellow cardboard with an 1883 printing
press. Some of the early toys came unglued during hot weather and the iron
powder rusted, but Herzog remedied the problems by using different glue and
magnetite powder. Then, he faced another challenge with the 29-cent toy:
Getting his creation to children. "Everybody turned it down," Herzog
says about the dime-store retailers he and his brother, Don, 85, approached. After
several months of unsuccessful peddling, a reluctant buyer for G.C. Murphy Co.,
based in McKeesport, Pa., ordered six dozen Wooly Willies and tested them in
his store in Indianapolis. "He said, 'I'll still have all of them a year
from now,'" Herzog recalls. "Two days later, he called and ordered a thousand
dozen. The rest is history." And what a history. More than 75 million
Wooly Willies have been sold along with more than 200 million magnetic toys
with a cast of characters, including Dapper Dan, Hair-do Harriet, Betty
Brunette, Fuzzy Wuzzy and Doodle Bug. In the 1950s and '60s, Smethport
Specialty Co. worked frantically to fill orders for the popular toys, running
three shifts a day, even on Christmas Day. The company built a modern factory
in 1965 on Magnetic Avenue and expanded the building three times. Today, Wooly
Willy is making another generation smile and is among 200 magnetic toys, games
and puzzles manufactured by Smethport Specialty Co., now owned by Patch
Products, headquartered in Beloit, Wis. (pop. 35,775). Wooly Willy's appeal is
timeless because the toy is simply fun, says Greg Rounsville, 51, Smethport
Specialty's general manager. "Kids can draw so many faces on him,"
adds Rounsville, whose three sons today are among the company's 42 employees. Though
Wooly looks much the same as he did in 1955, the manufacturing process today is
fully automated. An offset press prints 3,000 cardboard sheets an hour, then
adds a glossy, smudge-proof coating. Other machines form plastic packages and
assemble the toys, which are packed for shipping to hundreds of stores in the
United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.