- NEW YORK - The two men are standing, ready to pounce, like car salesmen.
Someone so much as looks at them, they're getting the spiel.
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- "We make U.F.O.s. It's that simple,"
said Joe Plishke.
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- "Fly this and you'll get people
calling the cops saying, "What is that thing?' " said his son
and partner, Joe Turton.
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- They are standing because they are proud
of their product and because they know they have to hustle if they want
to make a mint.
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- But, also, they are standing because
they can't afford the chairs.
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- Turton, a 26-year-old Westlake author
of gift books, and his 46-year-old father, a Florissant, Mo., car wholesaler,
are convinced they have the next hot toy on their hands.
-
- Of course, everyone else at the American
International Toy Fair in New York - from big toy makers offering appointment-only
tours of their office building showrooms to garage inventors praying for
notice in their small slice of a huge convention center - thinks the same
thing about their stuff.
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- What the two Joes have - and if you make
eye contact with either one, you're gonna have to hear this - is a Styrofoam
rotary kite, a disk with a single wing through the middle, that has slots
to hold chemical light sticks like the kind they sell at the circus.
-
- Load the kite with light sticks (which
only last for a handful of hours and thus would need to be repurchased),
fasten fishing line to the wing tips and fly it at night. They promise
the people will flock.
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- With a Waynes World-quality video, a
few hand-crafted prototypes and their own naive confidence, they're trying
to convince anyone who will listen at the mind-numbing Toy Fair that "Icarian,"
as their product is named, will sell like Hula Hoops.
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- But that costs money: the convention
fee, the airfare, the Manhattan hotel.
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- And when they arrived Thursday morning,
they were informed the 10-by-10-foot square of carpeting they would stand
on would cost more than $100. Same with the tiny table they need for their
TV/VCR. The chairs, and their $60 price tag, they decided to do without.
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- So they're doing stand-up. Getting a
few laughs and a few hecklers and, they hope, more than a few solid contacts.
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- "Silly String. Pet Rock. Hula Hoop.
And now this," said Plishke, who seems unfazed by his failure to succeed
in efforts to market the kite for almost a decade as "Starcruiser"
and "Orbital Projections."
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- "We know we got something big here."
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- But does anyone else know it?
-
- "I've been right where they are,"
said sympathetic toy inventor Corky Newcomb of New Hampshire.
-
- The odds are significantly against the
two Joes, and they don't even know yet whether they want to make and sell
the kites or peddle the idea to someone else.
-
- "Here's my card. Give me a call
when you're ready to roll with these," says a New Jersey toy shop
owner.
-
- Jon Reinschreiber, a Cleveland Heights
native who owns a kite shop in a trendy neighborhood of Portland, Ore.,
said he was unimpressed.
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- "That's the kiss of death,"
said Reinschreiber.
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- Turton said their enthusiasm will prevail.
"We're just so stoked about this."
-
- Pete McDonald of Hudson is just as enthusiastic
about his toy idea, but there is no way he'd take to the showroom floor
to say it.
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- "I don't need that. Even though
it's toys, it doesn't sound like much fun," he said.
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- McDonald, a 28-year Firestone Rubber
Co. employee who retired in 1985 and now works as a tire print analyst,
mainly testifying as an expert witness in criminal cases, developed an
idea for a set of tire-footed characters who solve mysteries the way he
does.
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- McDonald and his friend, artist Ron Hill
of Solon, who drew the characters, made prototypes in their studios and
hope to interest a major toy company in making toys, games and books based
on his idea.
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- They hired Chris Brown, a Hudson marketing
consultant and former Hasbro executive. She went to New York to pitch the
idea in private meetings. No booth. No huckstering. She's too afraid the
idea would get stolen.
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- "I'm paranoid," she said, "but
paranoid is a pretty good thing until you're signed on the dotted line."
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