Burt Meyer brought toy joy to Baby Boomers, Millennials and all the Gens — from Alpha to X to Z.
An inventor, designer and artist, Mr. Meyer, whose work contributed to Chicago becoming a vibrant center of toy design, died Oct. 30 at a west suburban retirement community. He was 99.
He helped create a pre-video game monoculture among kids who clamored for the classic toys and games he worked on, including Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, Lite-Brite, Toss Across, Mr. Machine and Mouse Trap, which was one of the first three-dimensional board games.
They were produced by a toy studio that rivaled Santa’s workshop: Marvin Glass & Associates, which operated in Chicago from the 1940s into the 1980s.
It was a golden era of toy design, when playthings made of wood, steel and paper gave way to mass-produced toys fueled by post-World War II prosperity and the rise of plastics.
Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, produced in 1966, didn’t just sell big in the Baby Boom. Mattel rolled out a new version to promote the 1999 movie “Toy Story 2,” replacing the Red Rocker and Blue Bomber with Buzz “Defender of the Universe” Lightyear and the evil Emperor Zurg. It was spoofed on “The Simpsons.” And now Vin Diesel is set to star in a movie based on the robots.
Lite-Brite — a toy Mr. Meyer helped roll out in 1967 — glowed anew in 2022, when it provided a way to communicate with friends stuck in the Upside Down in Season 4 of “Stranger Things.”
“He was very happy and pleased with Lite-Brite and how it’s brought joy to people,” his son Steve Meyer said. “That what his life was about — bringing joy to the world.”
After working with Marvin Glass, Mr. Meyer formed his own company, Meyer/Glass, which produced Pretty Pretty Princess, Catch Phrase and Gooey Louie.
To be a successful toy designer, Mr. Meyer once told the Wednesday Journal of Oak Park and River Forest, “You have to have a childlike imagination.”
Born in Hinsdale to Esther and John Meyer, young Burt spent his early years in Massachusetts. From 1944 to 1946, he served in the Navy as an airplane mechanic, according to his son, who said Mr. Meyer used the GI Bill to study art at West Georgia College, then headed to “The New Bauhaus,” the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He taught for a while at the Atlanta Art Institute, but teaching wasn’t a good fit, his son said, for a simple reason: “He didn’t believe in grades.”
In the late 1950s, Mr. Meyer went to work for Marvin Glass & Associates. Glass and his employees were responsible for bringing the world perennially popular toys and games including Operation, Simon, Mystery Date, Inchworm, Toss Across and Ants in the Pants.
The playthings dreamed up and incubated at Marvin Glass were then mass-produced by companies like Mattel, Hasbro, Ideal, Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley.
Mr. Meyer said the Lite-Brite prototype was an immediate hit when he demonstrated it for Hasbro chief executive officer Merill Hassenfeld. He recalled the moment for Bill Paxton, author of the book “A World Without Reality: Inside Marvin Glass’ Toy Vault.”
“So I brought it in and turned the lights out,” Mr. Meyer told Paxton. “As soon as I put one peg in there, it lit up. Merrill said, ‘That’s my item!’ We had a contract by the end of the day.”
He and Glass got the idea for Rock ’Em Sock ’Em robots while touring an arcade, he said in an interview with Tim Walsh, a toy and game designer who once said the plastic pugilists gave kids sore thumbs long before Nintendo.
“One day, we found this two-player boxing game,” he told Walsh in his book “Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers who Created Them.” “It was very cumbersome with figures that were covered with rubber, so they looked somewhat real.”
When pro boxer Davey Moore died after a 1963 fight, the concept for a violent boxing game stalled. But Mr. Meyer had a “tenacious streak,” Walsh said.
“My dad slept on it, and Dad came back and said, ‘This idea is good — let’s make them robots’,” Steve Meyer said.
“Obviously, they don’t fall over dead,” Mr. Meyer thought, according to a 2011 Deadspin interview. “Maybe their heads can pop up.”
Mr. Meyer and Glass got the idea for Mouse Trap from a labyrinthine Rube Goldberg cartoon called “How to Remove the Cotton Out of a Bottle of Aspirin,” according to the book “It’s All a Game: A Short History of Board Games.”
Mr. Meyer later started his own business, Meyer/Glass, which produced Pretty Pretty Princess, Catch Phrase and Gooey Louie.
“Burt Meyer coupled an artistic background with a special capacity to transform toy and game concepts into three dimensions, generating iconic playthings like Lite-Brite, Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, and Gooey Louie,” said Christopher Bensch, chief curator for the Strong National Museum of Play. “All of these toys have delighted multiple generations, and Lite-Brite shines as a National Toy Hall of Fame classic.”
Mr. Meyer and his future wife Marcia met when they whirled around the floor together as part of an Eastern European folk-dance troupe. They were married for nearly half a century. The Meyers raised their family in a McCormick row house in Lincoln Park.
Every Christmas, the kids “got a look at the new toys coming off the line,” Steve Meyer said.
They moved to the aviation-friendly Brookeridge section of Downers Grove, where pilots like Mr. Meyer — who didn’t give up flying until he was 90 — had homes next to a landing strip. The Meyers threw square-dancing parties in their own hangar.
Walsh recalled that when he interviewed the toymaker, who was then in his 80s, at his home, Mr. Meyer told him they’d be going for a spin in the sky.
“He did not say the plane was in his garage, and we would be flying out of his backyard,” Walsh said. “That was a bit of a surprise.”
Mr. Meyer once built an amphibious seaplane from a kit. And it took him five years, but he also built a glider plane — from scratch in his basement, using plans he bought.
He helped found the Windy City Soaring Association and competed in national glider championships, according to his son.
For 20 years, Mr Meyer would fly a seaplane to a remote island north of Thunder Bay, Ontario, where he and his kids would fish, and, his son said, “We would see moose and bear.”
When other anglers started showing up, “We got in the plane and moved up another 100 to 150 miles, to a new, quiet spot,” according to Steve Meyer.
After Mr. Meyer retired at 59, he did a solo ride on his bicycle from the Pacific to Charleston, South Carolina. “He dipped his tire in the water in California and rode to Charleston,” his son said.
He kayaked the Northwest Passage.
And, at 69, he trained for a North Pole trip by working out with aerobics, a cross-country ski machine and a StairMaster, on which he’d climb while carrying a heavy backpack. At the North Pole, Mr. Meyer skied 130 miles with a dog-sledding team.
He also scuba-dived in Fiji and the Solomon Islands and traveled several times to Africa.
In 1976, Mr. Meyer escaped a workplace shooting unharmed. Another designer at Marvin Glass & Associates opened fire in their offices at 815 N. LaSalle St., killing three coworkers and himself.
Surviving “just fueled his desire to live a life to the fullest,” his son said.
His wife died in 2001. In addition to his son Steve, Mr. Meyer is survived by his daughter Sheryl, son Lee, grandchildren Judd, Jamie, Steve, Paul, Maya and Alec and six great-grandchildren.
Services are being planned.