Pyro Plastics Corporation

The Pyro Plastics Corporation of Union, New Jersey was a manufacturer of plastic toys and model kits popular during the 1950s and 1960s.

The company was founded in 1939 by William M. "Bill" Lester (1908-2005) and his first wife, Betty L (Lubarsky). Rapidly establishing itself as a “leading contractor of custom-made parts and products in plastic” Pyro employed the injection molding method for forming plastic shapes, which Lester had perfected in the early 1930s. During World War II, the company manufactured parts for military use, including aircraft components.

After the war, Pyro turned its attention to toys and promotional items. In the late 1940s, the company began to produce toy “clicker pistols”, and eventually became one of the leading manufacturers of military toys during the Korean War period. The public’s interest in outer space soon led the company to offer a number of space-themed toys including conceptual rocket ships and the "Pyrotomic disintegrator" ray gun (1953) which became extremely popular.

From the mid-1950s, Pyro manufactured model kits covering a wide range of subjects. These included automobiles, aircraft, ships, replica historic firearms, animals, dinosaurs, anatomical and educational models. Innovative when first introduced, Pyro kits featured two-part mirror-molded sectional bodies, hulls, gun-barrels or fuselages which would be assembled horizontally. This design allowed mold-makers to offer multiple variations of some subjects, requiring only minor modification to the master mold. However, by the mid-to-late 1960s, this type of tooling had been rendered obsolete by the side slide molding process innovated by George Toteff, first at AMT and later at MPC which allowed manufacturers to produce one-piece car bodies with crisply detailed engraving.

Pyro developed license agreements with other model and toy companies beginning in the late 1950s, loaning out some of its molds, while, in turn, reboxing kits by other manufacturers under the Pyro label. (This is a common practice among model makers, even today.) A partial list of companies sharing molds with Pyro include: Life-Like, Lionel Trains, Eagle, Inpact, Otaki, and Palmer Plastics (which Pyro acquired in 1970).

Lester sold the company in 1972, partly in order to pursue his interest in the development of tamper-proof packaging. Pyro was sold to Life-Like, which, along with Palmer Plastics, had already re-boxed a number of Pyro kits under license. (These early re-boxings often shared Pyro kit numbers as well as original box art lithography and instruction sheets.) Exact details of the sale were never publicly disclosed. Eventually, the Pyro toolings were acquired by Lindberg Products, Inc., and were re-issued with new box art many times, well into the early 2000s. (Lindberg subsequently became part of J. Lloyd International, which was, in turn sold to Round2 LLC of South Bend, Indiana in 2013.)

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