The PopCult Toybox
The Marx Toy Museum in Moundsville will close its doors for good on June 30. That means you have about a week left to visit one of the coolest spots in the state and take in the history of one of the greatest toy companies of all time. The museum will continue as a virtual entity and a series of traveling exhibits, but the physical location simply became too expensive to operate.
If you have not made the trek up North to visit the Marx Toy Museum, I implore you to make the effort to check it out before the end. Your PopCulteer and his lovely wife were in Wheeling and Moundsville last weekend for the annual Marx Toy Convention (you will see more photos from that later this week), and we made one last trip to the museum, hanging out with fellow MTM supporters one last time for the after-hours get-together, complete with DiCarlo’s pizza and tons of great deals on toys and stuff.
To help entice you to make the trip, today we’re going to bring you one last photo essay, which follows in the footsteps of the massive five-part photo essay that we posted after our first visit to the museum. I also want to thank Francis Turner and the Turner family for their generosity in sharing this epic collection with the public for fifteen years. They have demonstrated the classiest way to share a toy collection with the world, and I hope they inspire others to follow their example.
We still haven’t ironed out all the captioning bugs with our new blogging template, so we present these images without much in the way of explanation. Go visit the museum and they’ll tell you all about what you see here.
Nestled on Second Street in Moundsville, this is The Marx Toy Museum
Let’s go in one last time, shall we?
There’s still plenty of goodies left to buy from the gift shop
The Prototype Room
The first display area
Some of these are newly-acquired and very rare Marx Military trains
Johnny West and Friends..
Spectacular Playsets and toys…
Toys with Wheels…
One last visit to “The Clubhouse”…
You have one more week to visit The Marx Toy Museum in Moundsville. Don’t miss this chance to see history and have fun at the same time. You will remember this for a lifetime.
Maaaaannnn, if that place is closing, what’s going to happen to all those cool toys? 🙁
So glad I got to visit with my wife and two very good friends last year! Certainly will miss future opportunities to see such a tremendous collection all in one place and so beautifully and touchingly displayed! Thank you Rudy for posting these spectacular pictures!
So great to see many of the toys I sold whilst employed by Marx for 19 years.
After leaving Marx I started my own company and ultimately acquired he tools for Rock-Em-Sock-Em Robots from Richard Beecham of Dunbee Combex Marx. LM was my mentor and ultimately my company exceeded the volume of LM and I went public. Without my contact and gaining the knowledge from LM, I never would have succeeded. He was the King Of Toys and I have the article written in Time Magazine dated December 12, 1955.
I have many momentoes given me by LM including the photo of LM and Idella with their children and 5 GENERALS.
I believe I am one of the few remaining/living former employees of LM, as I am 87 years old and still active. You are welcome to contact me by e-mail.
Best
Joe Kling