This evening, in one of Southern California's coastal towns, we were meeting a retired Mattel Liaison Engineer - the same person that Bruce had purchased the 2nd Pink Rear Load Beach Bomb from.

In the interests of privacy, we'll call him "Mr. W". Mr. W and his wife, Mrs. W met us at the restaurant at 7:00 PM. What followed was a detailed accounting of some of his memories of Mattel past, and some detailed information about the processes and design decisions that occurred then, over thirty years ago.

I was mesmerized as the evening went on - the details this gentleman was privy to, the tales of Mattel past, the great fun times that were a part of Mattel - Pre-Corporate America. It was hard to keep taking notes, I kept getting lost in the rich history that Mr. W was a part of. To say it was a special evening would be an understatement.

In this article, I will try to put together some of the great details that we learned in this three-hour dinner.

At the time, Mattel was in full-swing production for Hot Wheels and Mr. W (along with most other Mattel employees in his department) was working 80 hour weeks. The work was constant and never-ending. He was lured to the U.S. with a starting salary of $180 per week. He and Mrs. W were ecstatic with this salary and were living well. 

Soon after being hired, Mr. W received an unexpected surprise when he suddenly got a 60% pay raise!

It turns out that one of the expatriated employees had researched Mattel's pay scale and filed a complaint under the "White Slavery Act" which basically prohibited a Company from recruiting employees overseas and paying them less than American employees. So, within a few weeks of their arrival, Mr. and Mrs. W were doing quite well!

Mr. W's experiences began in Production and he soon graduated to Manufacturing Engineering. His next promotion was as Liaison Engineer, where he took over the liaison responsibilities between Manufacturing and Research and Development.

Research and Development's role at the time was to determine whether a design could be made or not.

From there, the "First Shots" were sent to City Of Industry, California for Quality Control. 

He remembers a trend at the time - Missile factories were being turned into Toy factories!

Mr. W recalled how the first car to actually roll down the production line was the Custom Camaro. At the time, the goal was to produce one million cars a week. A Company called HH Plastics was responsible for the production of the actual wheels. Production numbers on wheels was between 3 and 4 million wheels a week!

He recalls that the wheel molds had 32 "cavities" each. 

One of the contractors for the die cast work was A & A Die Casting. 

At this point, Mr. W flashed-forward to the 1974-'75 era when he recalled traveling to Hong Kong and seeing an "army of girls", cleaning, filing and scraping the car bodies to remove and clean the "flash" created by the die-casting process. The pay rate for those Hong Kong employees?  Pennies

Mr. W recalled the Die Casting process at the time. (keep in mind this is from my limited note-taking and memory)

There were several quality levels of Zinc Alloy being used at the time:

Zamac 1

Zamac 3

Zamac 5

Zamac 7

The number grades related to the amount of Copper in the Zinc Alloy mix. He recalls that the Zinc from Indonesia was not of very good quality (at which point Bruce, Dave and I speculated that perhaps the Indonesia-produced Zinc was the alloy used in the Hong Kong castings...)

He remembers the Australian-produced Zinc, (Zamac 3)  being of extremely high quality. (U.S. castings?)

The die casting process was a 3 to 4 second process.

First, the molds were sprayed with a release.

Then, the machines (molds) were heated.

At this point, 80 pounds of liquid Zinc was poured into the machine. The liquid Zinc was squirted into the hardened, steel mold. 

Within seconds, the sides would come out, (apart) the front and back would come out and the metal "trees" would be placed, hanging, on a conveyor. 

In four seconds, 4 car bodies were produced.

There were 144 "Engineering Pilots" made for study, research and development.

There were 2500 "Production Pilots" made, which had to be perfect before production would commence.

.

Bruce Pascal and Mr. W, looking at Bruce's extensive list of Mattel employees.

He told us about some of the "Consumer marketing" that was being implemented by Mattel then. The Mattel employees' kids were categorized by age and sex. This would determine which toys they got to "test". 

Typically, there were approximately 100 production samples of certain cars given away. They would always be in some sort of container, such as a sealed baggie, but never loose. (for safety reasons) So these production sample were simply given away as test market toys!

Another category, the Mattel defects were sold at the Mattel Toy Club at closeout prices. Even today, the Mattel Toy Club sells (non-defective) cars that failed to sell in the stores and they often have closeout prices on them. 

Taking a break from some of the technical details, Mr. W recounted some of the fun times at Mattel in the early days. It was common to see Elliott and Ruth Handler or Matt Madsen (the founders) in and around Mattel. He quipped about the origins of the Mattel name - the combination of Matt and Elliott made up the name: Mattel. 

Mr. W said that Elliott Handler was more of a "hands-on" type. It was common for Mr. W to be working on a project and look up and realize that Mr. Handler was right there, working side-by side with him!

Ruth Handler was more of a "whip-cracker". She would walk through and notice if production had slowed or if mistakes were being made and she would get things moving along again.

Although Mr. W's early days at Mattel were intensely busy, there were a lot of fun times, too. Mr. W recounted some of the great pranks that only engineers could think up! 

Mrs. W told us about the Saturday evening "Hot Wheels Wives" parties. Since the husbands were too busy working, the wives got together and created themed social events on Saturday nights.

Hot Wheels races were held every week. Being in the engineering department, Mr. W had a few cars cast out of "Cerabend" a heavy alloy that was twice the weight of Zinc yet would actually melt in boiling water!

Needless to say, his Hot Wheels racing team always won and the other competitors were left wondering how they did it!

This evening with a former Mattel employee turned out to be far more interesting than I initially thought it would be. 

I gathered a ton of great information and was treated to an evening with great company, tales of Mattel past and a greater understanding of the processes and the people that made these little treasures called Hot Wheels!

Special thanks to Bruce Pascal and Dave Lopez for inviting me to this special dinner!