The truck in the box, and who made it
The truck in this box says Tonka on the side. Tonka did not make it.
The name belongs to Hasbro. The truck is made under license by another company entirely, and that company filed for bankruptcy in June 2024. F32 F36
Three years before that, it left about a hundred and sixty thousand of these trucks sitting in China, because shipping one to America had come to cost forty percent of its price on the shelf. F33
This is how a family of Minnesota steel trucks became a license, and at the end, which Tonka is still worth buying today and how to read the one in your garage.
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Six people and two trucks in Mound
Start in Mound, Minnesota, on the twenty-second of June, 1946. F1 Three men, Lynn Baker, Avery Crounse and Alvin Tesch, open a company called Mound Metalcraft. F2 It is not a toy company. It makes garden tools and metal tie racks. F3
The building they move into had been used to make ammunition boxes during the Second World War. F4 That detail matters more than it sounds. A shop set up to press and fold sheet metal for ammunition boxes is a shop set up to press and fold sheet metal for anything, and the war had just ended. The skills and the machines were sitting there, looking for a new product.
And the previous occupant had left something behind that turned out to matter more than the building: designs for toy trucks. F5 Mound Metalcraft took them over.
In 1947 they carried their first toy trucks to the New York Toy Fair. F6 Early on, the whole operation was about six people assembling two models, a steam shovel and a crane. F9 Six people and two trucks. Hold on to that number, because in thirty years it will be two thousand people and more than ten million trucks a year.
The name came from the water outside. Lake Minnetonka takes its name from the Dakota word tanka, which means great, or big. F7 The company eventually renamed itself Tonka Toys Incorporated. F8 A name borrowed from a lake, in a town built on its shore.
The founders did not stay to see what it became. Tesch and Crounse left in 1952, after the board turned down a plan to move the business to Tennessee. F10 Baker left in 1961, for his health. F11 By then the thing they had started was already running on its own, and it was about to run very fast.
When nine homes in ten owned a Tonka
What made a Tonka a Tonka was the material. Through the 1940s and into the 1980s, the trucks were pressed from stamped steel, and that is where the reputation came from: Tonka Tough. F12 A child could stand on one. Plenty did. A toy that survives a sandbox, a driveway and a younger brother is a toy that gets handed down, and a toy that gets handed down sells the next one.
Between 1955 and 1960, Tonka's sales tripled. F14 And then the numbers stop sounding like a toy company and start sounding like a utility.
By 1966, according to household surveys, eighty-five percent of American homes owned a Tonka. F15
By 1969 it was more than ninety percent. F15 Between 1965 and 1969, sales more than doubled, from about twenty-two million dollars to more than forty-five. F16
In 1964 came the Mighty series, the big construction trucks, the yellow ones most people picture when they hear the name. F13 If you grew up in America in the second half of the twentieth century and you think of a toy dump truck, the picture in your head is almost certainly one of these.
At the peak, between 1974 and 1975, Tonka reached a hundred and two point one million dollars in annual sales. F17 The factory was turning out somewhere between thirteen and sixteen million toy trucks a year. F18
And here is the number that tells you what that meant to the place. The plant in Mound employed more than two thousand people at that peak. F19 The town itself had about nine thousand, two hundred and eighty residents in 1980. F23 One factory, and more than one job for every five people in town. That is not a company in a town. That is a town built around a company.
1983: the plant closes
Then it left. In 1979 a new management team took over, and in 1983 it closed the plant in Mound. F49 F48 About five hundred workers were laid off when it ended. F21 Production moved to El Paso, Texas, and across the border to Juárez, Mexico. F20
And around the same move, about forty percent of Tonka's toy manufacturing went out to outside suppliers. F24 Keep that forty percent in mind. It is the first time the name on the box and the hands that built the truck started to separate. For almost forty years, Tonka had meant a building in Mound. From here on, it meant a brand that other people could make.
The town, for the record, did not disappear. By 1990 Mound had about nine thousand, six hundred and thirty-four residents, more than before the plant closed. F23 This town outlived its factory. But the thing that had made it famous was gone.
The second step was money. In 1987, Tonka bought Kenner Parker Toys, the company behind Parker Brothers games, for more than half a billion dollars, and it borrowed nearly all of it. F25 That made Tonka the third-largest toy maker in America, and left its debt at eighty-six percent of its total capital. F26 Big, and fragile. A company that owes almost everything it is worth has very little room for one bad Christmas.
It did not last. In April 1991, Hasbro bought Tonka for roughly half a billion dollars. F27 Tonka became a division run out of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. F28 The company from Mound, Minnesota was now a name owned by a company in Rhode Island.
Hasbro owns the name, someone else builds the truck
Now the part the factory stories leave out, and it is the whole reason the truck in the box is what it is.
Hasbro kept the name. It stopped making the trucks. From 1998, Hasbro licensed Tonka manufacturing and distribution to a company called Funrise Toys. F29
It is worth being clear about what a license like that is. The company that owns the name does not design the truck, build it, ship it or sell it. Another company does all of that, puts the famous name on the box, and pays the owner for the right. The owner keeps the name. The licensee does the work and carries the risk.
For you, as the person buying, that has one practical consequence. When you pick up a box because of the name, the promise the name made decades ago was made by a company that no longer builds anything. The promise on today's box is being kept, or not, by whoever holds the license this year. The name is the same. The company standing behind it is not, and it can change without the box ever telling you.
The license moved again in June 2019, when a company called Basic Fun! announced it had secured the Tonka master toy license from Hasbro. F30 Its first Tonka line reached stores around the world in the fall of 2020. F31
So read that chain the way the box never will. Hasbro owns the Tonka name. Basic Fun! operates under a license; it does not own the brand. F32 The word on the side of the truck belongs to one company, and the truck belongs to another.
That is not a scandal. It is how a lot of famous names live now. But it changes what the word Tonka is promising you, and it changes who answers for the truck when something goes wrong. And in this case, something did go wrong, twice, in public.
160,000 trucks left in China
In 2021, the cost of shipping a container out of China spiked, and it hit a truck like this harder than most things. F33 A toy dump truck is big, light and cheap, which is exactly the wrong shape for expensive shipping: you are paying to move air.
For Basic Fun!, shipping a single Tonka Mighty Dump Truck to the United States had risen to forty percent of the truck's retail price, from seven percent a year earlier. F33
So the company made a decision it had never made before. It left about a hundred and sixty thousand Tonka Mighty Dump Trucks in China, roughly a third of the stock that was meant for American stores. F33
Think about what that means in a toy aisle. If one truck in every three never gets on the boat, then one space on the shelf in every three stays empty, in a season when that shelf is supposed to be full. For a company that does not own the name it sells under, and pays for the right to use it, that is not a small problem. It is exactly the kind of year that leaves a mark on the balance sheet.
The company's chief executive, Jay Foreman, put it plainly to Forbes. We've never left product behind in this way, he said. We really had no choice. F34
And that story answers a question most buyers never ask. At least as of 2021, when Forbes reported it, the Mighty Dump Truck was being made in China, under Basic Fun!. F35 I could not find a later source for where today's box comes from, so check the label on the one you are holding.
Three years later, on the twenty-eighth of June, 2024, Basic Fun! filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware, with estimated debt of between fifty and a hundred million dollars. F36 Chapter 11 is a reorganisation, not a closing: the company keeps trading while it restructures what it owes. Its plan was confirmed that October and took effect on the thirty-first, and the case was closed that December. F37 The company came out the other side, and it is still the one selling Tonka today. F47
The name on the box went through a factory closure, a buyout, two licenses and a bankruptcy. The logo barely changed. If you bought a Tonka in any of those years, nothing on the box would have told you which of those companies was standing behind it.
Which Tonka to buy today
So which one do you buy? The honest answer is that there are two very different trucks wearing the same name, sold side by side.
The Steel Classics Mighty Dump Truck still has a real steel dump bed, on a body that is partly sturdy plastic. It is not the all-steel truck of 1970, but the part that takes the abuse is still steel. F38 At Walmart this month it is sixty-two dollars and ninety-nine cents. F40 The same line covers a front loader, a pickup, a tow truck, a bulldozer and a road grader, and there is a Retro Steel collector's edition. F47
The Next Gen Mighty Dump Truck is a different thing. Plastic and zinc alloy, and no steel at all. F39
If what you are paying for is the thing that made the name, buy the one that says Steel Classics on the box, and check that the listing says steel. The word Tonka alone does not tell you which truck you are getting, and on an online listing the two can sit on the same page with the same yellow paint.
Three checks, then, before you pay. First, the line name on the box: Steel Classics or Retro Steel if you want the metal, Next Gen if you are fine with plastic. Second, the materials line in the listing, not the photo, because the photos are all yellow and they all look tough. Third, what you actually need it to survive. For a three-year-old in a sandbox, the steel bed earns its price. For a shelf, the Retro Steel collector's edition is the one built for it.
And there is a fourth option the box will never mention: the old one. A genuine steel Tonka from the sixties or seventies, in used condition, is still one of the toughest toys ever sold in America, and the secondhand market is full of them. Which brings us to how to tell what you are looking at.
How to date the Tonka in your garage
Now the one you might already own. Collectors date an old Tonka by its logo, and the logo changed on a fairly regular timeline. F42
An oval logo with a blue sea and seagulls points to roughly 1947 to 1957. F42
A white, grey and red oval points to roughly 1958 to 1961. F42
Red and gold points to about 1962 onward. F42
And in the late 1970s the oval went away for plain white lettering on red. F42
Treat those years as a collectors' guide rather than a law, because that is what they are. But if the truck in your garage has the seagulls on it, you are holding something from the first decade of a company that started in a building that used to make ammunition boxes.
As for what they are worth, here is a real sale rather than a guess. At a Bertoia Auctions sale, a Tonka Number Five Fire Ladder Truck in excellent to pristine condition sold for nine hundred dollars, nearly double its top estimate. F43 A boxed Tonka Allied Van Lines moving truck in near-mint condition carried an estimate of two hundred to four hundred. F44 Condition and the original box are most of the price. A rusty truck that has lived in a sandbox for fifty years is worth what it means to you, which is often more.
And for the record, the trucks themselves went into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong museum in Rochester, New York, in 2001. F41
Turn it over tonight
If you still have one, turn it over tonight and tell me in the comments which logo is on it, and where it came from. Half the history of these trucks lives in garages, not in archives, and that thread will be better than anything I can add here.
Every source for this episode, with its link and the date I checked it, is on the site linked below.
Next time, the paint aisle: why the dozen names on the cans come down to three companies, and how to read the can before you pay.
Subscribe if you want that one, and I will see you tomorrow.