(Radio Iowa) – The son of an iconic Iowa toy maker says the farm toys his dad created came out of a need to support the family. Joe Ertl says the Ertl Company was created by his father, Fred Ertl Senior, 80 years ago in the basement of their Dubuque home following a strike at the foundry where his dad worked. “After the war, with wage and price controls went off, they went on strike in Dubuque, three foundries, there was 900 men,” Ertl says. “And it was pretty drastic strike was and it lasted 18 weeks. Dad had five boys he had to feed, so he started making things in the basement of our home.” Ertl says a friends solved the problem of creating cast iron farm toys by giving his dad waste aluminum he had picked up at John Deere and other places.

“He gave him some of that so that he could make toys out of aluminum,” he says. “And that’s really where he came to build building the better mousetrap, he made him out of aluminum.” Joe says the family would all pile into the car and sell the farm toy tractors to local implement dealers for a dollar a piece. john Deere ordered 100-thousand replicas of its tractors, which the family made in the basement of their home. There were some unique features in the first models.

“We could not get rubber tires anything after the war so we made the first toys with aluminum wheels,” Ertl says. They expanded to a small 40-by-20 foot building to serve as a factory near their home on the west side of Dubuque, with around half a dozen employees and five kids working for the company in those early years. The moved to Dyersville when they needed more space.

The Ertl Company became internationally known by the 1960s, with Joe branching out in the 1970s to start his own farm toy manufacturing company – which led to the birth of Scale Models. At 88 years old, Joe is still involved with the company. He talked about the early days in the lead up to the National Farm Toy Show this past weekend in Dyersville.