Anna Jaskoviak keeps a seal on the dashboard of her car.
It is a pink plastic seal, and it is “kind of like a mascot,” said the 17-year-old senior at Waubonsie Valley High School in Aurora.
It is a pink plastic seal that she watched an antique machine craft for her at Brookfield Zoo, one of a number of such inanimate animals that Jaskoviak has, let us decide to say, gathered over the years.
“I wouldn’t call myself a collector, but I have a lot of them,” she said one recent weekday afternoon at Brookfield. “You don’t see a lot of things get made right in front of your eyes.”
The “them” in question are Mold-A-Rama figures, a kind of souvenir born at a world’s fair more than half a century ago that has, improbably, held on against competition from cheap T-shirts, refrigerator magnets and, now, 3-D printers.
Scraped out of their machines warm, shapely and smelling of recently melted plastic, Mold-A-Ramas are an upscale answer to the penny smasher, with the bonus that the molding machines don’t deface federal currency, only collect it.
These icons of a museum-going are a great benchmark for the businesses. “One of the things I always say is I know we’re having a busy day when you can smell the wax,” said Megan Williams, director of business enterprise at the Field Museum, which has four of the machines.
Mold-A-Ramas could also be considered the Hummel figurines of childhood, but they are considerably cheaper than Hummels, at $2 each, and much less determinedly adorable.
Jaskoviak always got one when her mom took her to Brookfield Zoo, she said, although her recent visit was with friends.
A family group with much younger kids at the zoo that same day, mostly from downstate Manteno, was all about the Mold-A-Ramas. They liked the real animals, yes, but it took little persuading for the pre-teens to stand together and hold up their blow-molded plastic acquisitions.
“They like to run to the machines, see what’s in them,” said Janet Denault, the grandmother to all but one of the five kids. “I think we have every one of them at our house.”
But they did not, until this last visit, have the brown plastic bison. That one was a new mold made expressly to commemorate the 50th anniversary this summer of Mold-A-Rama machines at the Brookfield Zoo.
A zoo news release about the occasion lauded the “warm, squishy feeling of a statuette cooling in eager hands.” A Mold-A-Rama Hall of Fame, featuring such collectible figures as the difficult-to-make Fairy Castle from the Museum of Science and Industry and new ones like the Willis Tower, is on display through August in the zoo’s Memory Lane gift shop.
Indeed, if you were to make a heat map of the United States showing all the places where Mold-A-Rama machines still operate, the west suburban zoo would likely glow the reddest. (That map would also probably find a way to emit that distinctive aroma redolent of a spatula left unattended in the pan.)
There are 13 of the machines operating at Brookfield, including the one producing the all-time best seller, a blue leaping dolphin.
That’s out of a total national machine population estimated at more than 100 but less than 150. The greatest number of those are operated by Mold-A-Rama, the family business located in Brookfield that has been running the machines since 1971.
Paul Jones, 50, the second generation of his family in the business, says another company, based in Florida, also has a sizable number of the machines.
But Illinois is the epicenter of the business. It was in Quincy that J.H. “Tike” Miller developed the machine, an offshoot of his recognition that people sometimes needed to replace just one piece in a Nativity scene.
He sold the rights to his machine to Automatic Retailers of America, which first introduced Mold-A-Ramas at the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962 (and had them built in Chicago, during that decade). An old news story says the machines cost $3,600 apiece.
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ARA was destined to get very big, however — it is now Aramark — and was ordered by regulators to divest some of its businesses in the early 1970s, according to Jones, who grew up in plastic figures. Jones’ father, Bill, bought some of the machines in 1971 and grew his business, Mold-A-Rama Inc., from there.
Exactly how much it grew, Jones won’t talk about. “I can’t give you that kind of information,” he said. “Since 1971, we’ve made millions of figures at Brookfield Zoo.”
He also doesn’t want photographers to show the inner workings of the machines. Maybe there wouldn’t be a copycat market for an item that is numbered only in the dozens, but why provide a blueprint?
Ask him if the machines are durable or finicky, and he’ll respond with a bit of philosophy.
“I would say ‘yes’ to both,” he said. “They are very durable, seeing as they’re 50 years old. They were built at a time when America was building things to last.
“When you say ‘finicky,’ the machines are primarily a plastic injection machine, secondarily they are a vending machine. Anybody who’s ever worked in plastics knows there is variability in the whole molecular structure of it. And today’s weather, hot and humid, just an old wet dollar bill can shut a machine down.”
He and his colleagues take care of 61 machines in the Midwest, including at Willis Tower, Lincoln Park Zoo, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Milwaukee County Zoo, the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan, and zoos in San Antonio and St. Paul.
They travel around, cleaning the clear plastic bubble tops, emptying the money, making sure everything is in working order. Jones travels with an offline machine in his van so that he has parts at the ready.
They refill the machine hoppers with plastic pellets, which get melted at 250 degrees in the machine’s “pot,” waiting for dollar bills to be fed into the machine.
“At Brookfield Zoo, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, they get checked every morning,” Jones said. “A machine holds 70 pounds of plastic in its hopper, and most machines need to be filled every day.”
A contemporary branding firm would probably tell you that Mold-A-Rama is a terrible name. It evokes scattershot abundance, things left too long in the refrigerator.
But it also evokes, for many adults, a time when things were simpler, when it was thrill enough to see a dolphin custom manufactured for you. You didn’t need to know that inside the two metal molds that press together and outline the figure’s shape, the liquid plastic fills the chamber and air blows out the unneeded material at the animal’s center; you didn’t need to know that the process is pretty much how your plastic Coke bottle is made too.
“It’s gone beyond how exciting it is to make your own toy,” said Jerry Johnston, Brookfield’s vice president of guest services. “Now the nostalgia has kicked in.”
There’s even been something of an uptick, Jones said, as the internet has blossomed and people who have a fleeting thought about a childhood toy suddenly have the tool to find out where they can still get one, or bring their kids to get one.
As for the other, even more modern technology that would seem a direct threat to Mold-A-Rama, Jones has a ready answer.
“I have had people come up to me numerous times and say, ‘3-D printing is going to put you out of business,’ ” he said. “And I say, ‘Can they make 15 an hour?’
“We say this is the original 3-D printer.”
The machines and the toys they produce cannot only survive the degenerative toll of time and the whims of souvenir fashion, they can even stand up to being perched, on the very hottest Chicago days, on a teenage girl’s automobile dashboard. That’s endurance.
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
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