Eddy Goldfarb, the father of numerous toy inventions, gets his day

On May 20, 2010 Mary Couzin announced in a Global Toy News exclusive, that Eddy Goldfarb is this year’s Toy and Game Inventors of the Year Awards Lifetime Achievement honoree. As I read Mary’s announcement, my mind immediately went back to the first time I met Eddy.

I was a lot younger then, at one of my first Toy Fairs and had never before met a toy inventor or any kind of inventor for that matter. So, when I met Eddy and was told that he had invented Yakkity Yak Teeth (aka Chattering Teeth), it was as if I had just been introduced to Thomas Alva Edison. Maybe it was because of the excitement of Toy Fair or the fact that Eddy looked like an inventor that I must have gotten pretty carried away because I believe I saw, Anita, Eddy’s wife, roll her eyes a little as I did, indeed, compare Eddy to Edison.

I probably did get a bit over excited, but I do I have an abiding admiration for toy inventors because, as Reuben Klamer, last year’s Lifetime Achievement Awards winner so aptly puts it, “they make something out of nothing.” He’s right and they also create products that bring joy, provide knowledge and sometimes shape lives.  

What is wonderful about Eddy and a product like Yakkity Yak Teeth is that they are so elegant that it seems like no one actually invented them; that they simply always existed. You just somehow assumed that Bronze Age people played with them as did Pleistocene era dinosaurs (now that would have been one scary set of Yakkity Yak Teeth). In fact, you might have expected them to have been created by God on the 8^th day. But no, it wasn’t God; it was Eddy back in 1949. 

So, thank you Eddy for Yakkity Yak Teeth, Battling Tops, Kerplunk, Shark Attack!, Stompers, Quiz Whiz, Numbers Up, Giant Bubble Guns, Milky the Cow, Baby Beans and more than 800 other inventions. And thank you Eddy and your fellow inventors for making the toy industry such a fun, creative and sometimes even distinguished place to work.

 Read blogs by Richard Gottlieb, Tim Walsh, Mary Couzin, Brian Maggio, John Baulch and Bruce Lund at Global Toy News www.globaltoynews.com