RETAIL TRADE: The Little King

• Share

(7 of 8)

Marx has puffed his way through Webster in twelve years. Now, on the second time around, his favorite expression is Dum Vivimus, Vivamus, which can be freely translated as "Live It Up." He found the exhortation so appealing that he had it embroidered on a batch of silk neckties that he gives away. His newest favorite word is "charismatic," a theological adjective pertaining to one who has a divine endowment to carry on the work to which he was called. Understandably. Marx caused a sensation when he applied the word to Ike at a White House dinner before Ike's heart attack.

Perhaps one reason Marx is so anxious to expand his English vocabulary is that he spoke only German until the age of six. He was born (Aug. 11, 1896) in Brooklyn, where his Berlin-born parents, Jacob and Clara Lou, owned a small drygoods store and left most of the job of raising young Louis to a German maid. By the time Louis reached P.S. 11, he was known derisively as "The Dutchman." Marx still speaks with a guttural rasp and nurses a distrust for German. On annual toy trips to Germany, Marx hires an interpreter, although, as he admits, "I understand like mad."

How to Make $5,000. As a boy Marx excelled at baseball, basketball, ice-skating and shoplifting. "Everyone stole," he recalls complacently. "You weren't anyone if you couldn't steal." When he was nine, Lou proved he was someone by recruiting an accomplice and going to Brooklyn's Abraham & Straus department store. There they picked out a canoe, hefted it over their heads and walked out through the delivery exit unchallenged. The rest of that summer Louis and friends spent boating on Prospect Park Lake nearby.

The Marx parents shifted their little store from neighborhood to neighborhood with scant success, and there were few luxuries for Louis, his elder sister Rose and younger brother Dave. "But I don't remember feeling my life was tough," says Louis. "People in Brooklyn were warm and understanding, and I learned a lot about democracy. The class struggle? Someone sold that idea. We never felt it."

Lou studied hard to get ahead. He graduated from elementary school at twelve and finished Fort Hamilton High in three years. At nights he pored over books "on how to become a $5,000-a-year man." After a short-lived job with a druggists' syndicate, Marx stumbled "by sheer happenstance" into an office-boy's job with Ferdinand Strauss, whose Zippo the Climbing Monkey and Alabama Coon Jigger (a clockwork minstrel) were the first mechanical toys mass-manufactured in the U.S. Within four years, Marx had been promoted to manage the company's East Rutherford, NJ. plant, and soon afterward he had his first idea for a toy. One of Strauss's products was a toy horn that bleated "Mamma, Papa." Marx amplified the sound effects, redesigned the horn to resemble a carnation and brought it out as a paper lapel flower that doubled as a noisemaker at parties.