Fred Kroll, 82, Brought Trouble and Hippos to Kids
Hyfler/Rosner
By STEPHEN MILLER Staff Reporter of the Sun
Fred Kroll, the toy-marketing maven who brought the board games Trouble
and Hungry, Hungry Hippos to generations of American children, has died at
age 82.
Kroll had been working in the toy business since 1938; his marketing
newsletter recently contained the following item: "Fred thinks he is the
oldest fully active person in the toy business. If any.reader knows of
another person with more years in the industry, please contact Fred."
"He's the last of the Mohicans of the toy business," his son, Bud Kroll,
said.
Among the games and toys he developed and sold were Crazy Faces,
Colorola, Roto Riter, Gyromatic (a gyroscope), kazoos, and several kinds of
riding fire engines.Trouble, a board game with color-coded men and unique
encapsulated dice, has sold about 50 million copies in America, according to
Hasbro, which manufactures the game. Hungry, Hungry Hippos, which he
originally licensed from a Japanese manufacturer, has sold more than 25
million copies in America.
Although he held several toy patents, he was not so much an inventor of
games as a developer and marketer who knew how to package and sell a good
idea when he saw one.
Kroll was the kind of marketer who sees the world in terms of people who
understand the "Six Ps of Marketing" and those who don't - the ones who are
doomed to failure."Sorry to be negative," he wrote in his newsletter. "But
whenever I read a sad letter from small toy firms wondering why they cannot
succeed in getting buyers to look at their item(s) I am convinced that they
have not done their homework."
He also produced numbered lists explaining how to get the most out of a
toy fair (he abominated the annual show at the Javits Center), and for how
to be a successful toy inventor. Rule no. 1: "Don't give up your day job!"
He needed such structures to deal with the evolution of the toy business.
Fred Kroll was born in Brooklyn and got his start in the toy business as
a sideline to his father's printing shop,located on 24th Street, which often
did jobs for the many toy companies with headquarters nearby. After Kroll's
brother was killed in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, the
business was sold and Kroll went to work for the buyer, Jack Pressman, who
was himself a titan among toy manufacturers.
A natural-born salesman, Kroll formed his own company in 1956 to market
home craft and preschool toys. Soon he was tapping into the nascent world of
TV advertising, often producing his own commercials, some starring his
family. He would even design his own advertising campaigns, in which he
typically applied his problem-solving bent. He liked to buy TV time at
stations in Buffalo,since he figured he got the Canadian viewers for free,
his son said.
The toy business had been a fairly finite world when he entered it. By
the 1960s, it was becoming international, and Kroll got into the act early,
licensing games from foreign companies and setting up complicated schemes
for manufacturing toys abroad.
In the mid-1970s, he set himself up in Florida as "Uncle Freddie's Fun
Factory," Uncle Freddie being his preferred moniker in later years.
Despite his many years in the business, Kroll in later years found
himself more of an outsider as giant retailers like Wal-Mart and Target came
to dominate the retailing scene. As an independent marketer, it was hard to
get the big retailers to pay attention to him instead of the giant toy
manufacturers. He plugged on, determined to get his products before the
public, and more often than not succeeded.
He showed no less determination in other sectors of his life. An
inveterate writer of letters to the editor, he once had a letter published
by Dear Abby about his campaign to change building codes to require
gender-neutral bathrooms in public buildings. The campaign - born because he
needed to help his Alzheimer's-stricken wife - eventually succeeded in
Florida, where he had moved.
Other campaigns were less intensely personal: He wrote to complain about
people flouting seat-belt laws and about foes of interstate construction who
"must enjoy traffic delays." He even bothered to write to the Palm Beach
Post to complain that the show "Seinfeld" was not funny.
He was renowned in south Florida for his charity, which distributed
nearly 400,000 toys over the past decade. Each year, he would troll the Hong
Kong toy manufacturers for odd lots and ship them back to America to give
away. He also had a matching program for the charitable gifts of his
neighbors, his son said.
Kroll kept working until the end, despite suffering from painful
cancer,and even as he was dying in the hospital, he could not help trying to
figure out how to fix the elevators his son said.