By James R. Hagerty
What does it take to keep kids amused? Before the invention of electronic games and smartphones, that was a more complicated question for parents. Burt Meyer provided many of the answers.
Meyer, who died Oct. 30 at the age of 99, played a large role in the design of toys that entranced baby boomers and still have fans today, including Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, Lite-Brite, Toss Across and Mouse Trap. Randy Klimpert, who worked for Meyer, recalls him as the most successful partner at Chicago-based Marvin Glass & Associates, the most prominent toy-design firm of the boomers' childhood era.
The idea that became Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots was nearly knocked out before it could reach store shelves. In the early 1960s, Meyer and his boss, Marvin Glass, who founded the Chicago toy-design firm, visited an arcade to seek inspiration. They noticed a game that involved action figures duking it out. Meyer began doodling designs for a boxing game that could be played at home.
Then, in March 1963, Davey Moore died after a televised prize fight with Sugar Ramos. Pope John XXIII denounced boxing as barbaric. Bob Dylan wrote a protest song about Moore's death. Meyer and Glass concluded it was the wrong time to release a boxing toy.
Meyer soon came up with another idea: Why not let robots (or what passed for robots in the 1960s) do the bashing? He devised a game involving two plastic robots, controlled by levers. The winner would be whichever player managed to knock the head off the other player's robot.
By late 1964, Kmart stores were advertising Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots for $7.97. The game, now produced by Mattel, is still on the market.
In an autobiographical summary of his career, Meyer said his favorite toy design was Lite-Brite, which allows people to create colorful designs by plugging plastic pegs into a grid. He recalled being inspired by blinking lights in a Manhattan window display.
The object of Mouse Trap, a board game featuring a Rube Goldberg-style contraption, is to catch plastic mice. Toss Across blends elements of cornhole and tic-tac-toe.
The joys of fake vomit
Marvin Glass, whose firm's origins date to the early 1940s, pioneered the idea of forming independent design studios to invent toys that could be licensed to toy manufacturers. Early designs included fake vomit and a plastic robot called Mr. Machine, a windup robot that was transparent, allowing children to see how the gears worked. The firm was so successful that toy manufacturers routinely traveled to Chicago to see its latest prototypes.
When Meyer joined the firm in 1959, the offices and design studios were inside a seedy Chicago hotel, the Alexandria, where 20 or so designers and technicians worked in white lab coats. The firm moved in the mid-1960s to a boxy two-story building with security cameras and windowless rooms, to deter rivals from snooping on toy designs. The interior was oddly decorated with chandeliers and sculptures of nude women, according to "Timeless Toys," a 2005 history by Tim Walsh. A Chinese chef prepared lunches for the staff and guests.
Glass did well enough to furnish a luxurious home featured in Playboy magazine in 1970 under the heading: "A Playboy Pad: Swinging in Suburbia." His art collection included works by Dali, Chagall and Picasso.
After Glass died in 1974, Meyer and the other partners carried on with the business. By the mid-1980s, Meyer was wealthy enough to retire, at age 59, to pursue his hobbies, which included flying airplanes and gliders.
The remaining partners dissolved Marvin Glass in 1988. Many of the employees found jobs at spinoff firms but others faced unemployment. Meyer recruited some of those employees for a new company, Meyer/Glass Design, in which Abelia Glass, the widow of Marvin Glass, was a financial partner.
One of Meyer's sons, Steve, joined Meyer/Glass and eventually succeeded his father as head of the firm, whose hit products included Silly 6 Pins, a bowling game, and Gooey Louie, which involves picking the nose of a plastic character. Introduced in 1995, Gooey Louie was advertised as "grosser than gross."
Klimpert, who was a partner at Meyer/Glass, said working in a toy-design studio wasn't fun and games. The pressure to find new hits was intense, and most ideas went nowhere.
Early in his career, Klimpert recalled, he was asked to come up with a game involving plastic cars. He kept presenting ideas; Meyer kept rejecting them. Finally, in exasperation, Klimpert asked Meyer to spell out what he wanted. Meyer replied that if he knew what he wanted he wouldn't have hired Klimpert.
Taking flight
Burton Carpenter Meyer was born April 18, 1926, in Hinsdale, Ill. His father, John F. Meyer, was a pharmacist. His mother, Esther (Carpenter) Meyer, managed the home. As a boy, he enjoyed building model airplanes. In 1944, he enlisted in the Navy and served for two years as an aircraft mechanic.
After earning a degree in product design at the Institute of Design in Chicago, he taught at the Art Institute of Atlanta, then returned to Chicago, where he worked as a designer of jukeboxes and displays for trade shows. He applied at Marvin Glass in 1959 after a colleague spotted a help-wanted sign there.
Meyer's survivors include three children, six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. His wife, Marcia (Kass) Meyer, died in 2001.
He had a TOY KING license plate on his Lexus ES 350. When he wasn't designing toys, Meyer spent much of his time flying airplanes, including various Cessna models. In 1971, he moved his family to the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, where his home was adjacent to a runway and he had a hangar to store his planes. He also flew gliders, sometimes in time trials, and competed in cross-country skiing races.
At age 59, he rode a bicycle from California to South Carolina. But his taste for adventure was far from sated. A decade later, at 69, he joined a two-week expedition to the North Pole, traveling by airplane, skis and dog sleds.
Around camp fires on his adventure trips, he played a harmonica. On a kayaking trip in Belize, a tour leader discovered that she couldn't light her portable cooking stove. She consulted Meyer, who was known for creative problem-solving. He showed her how to use one of her shoelaces to fashion a wick. The dinner plans were saved.
Write to James R. Hagerty at reports@wsj.com
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November 25, 2025 10:00 ET (15:00 GMT)
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