Stories R Us
And a family history video.
Charles Lazarus, the founder of Toys R Us, died in 2018, but he would have turned 101 years old on Friday.
I've always liked his entrepreneurial story, so I'm glad to have a reason to tell it. But, I have another reason -- a bit of a twist at the end that has to do with something I've been thinking about recently.
Let's start with the story.
Lazarus started the company that would become Toys R Us in 1948, when he and millions of other veterans had just come home from World War II.
He was 25, and his inspiration was simple:
"Everybody I met in the service said they were going to go home and get married and have children," he said in an interview, I think around the time of his retirement (video clip embedded below).
Children meant houses, and houses meant furniture, so that's what Lazarus got into. He opened Children's Bargain Town, in Washington, D.C.'s Adams Morgan neighborhood, and found some success.
He also had a realization: Parents who bought a crib or a high chair for their firstborn, and who then had another child, would use the same furniture for the second kid. And the third, and a hypothetical fourth or fifth.
That affected the bottom line at Children's Bargain Town. But even if parents only bought most furniture once, their kids outgrew their toys over and over and over again.
So, he pivoted: moving out of his original store in Washington, moving out to Maryland, and moving into toys and games.
He changed the name. I’ve wondered for a while if "Toys R Us” was inspired by his own name, which sort of sounds like it, “Lazarus.” But I can’t find any source that says so. Anyway, here’s how he described the toy business:
"It's fun. It's great. Remember, nobody has to buy what we sell. You buy it because you want to buy it. ...
Although over the years, I have tried to teach children to say, 'I need it,' rather than 'I want it!' …
You have to have imagination. You have to think like a child. Somebody ... said: If you want to know about baby toys, lay on the floor ... See what it looks like from their perspective. You know how big you look to a baby?"
Lazarus had been a cryptologist in the military, and his technical background prompted him to take Toys R Us into the computer age long before most other companies did.
Eventually, Toys R Us grew, during the 1980s, to be the leading seller of toys in America—and Lazarus was the highest-paid CEO. He stayed in that role until 1994, and chairman until his retirement in 1998.
Not long after his departure, however, things fell apart:
In 2001, Toys R Us made the controversial decision to outsource its entire online operation to Amazon. This meant that not only did Toys R Us not gain expertise, but Amazon got all its data.
Then, the company took on a ton of debt as part of a leveraged buyout.
And, to be fair, Toys R Us ran into a demographic buzzsaw: Millennials didn't grow up to have as many children as their parents had.
In a weird twist of timing, Lazarus died in March 2018, one day before Toys R Us began its bankruptcy liquidation.
Since then, the Toys R Us brand has come back from the dead, sort of (a detail I love, since again, we're talking about a founder named Lazarus). An investment firm bought the intellectual property rights to the brand and relaunched it.
But that's not where I want to end the story.
Instead, it's that the reason I started learning about Lazarus's tale a few years ago was that I came across a short video interview that his family had apparently convinced him to do, in order to record his personal history.
If he hadn't done that -- and he says in the short section of the interview that's posted on YouTube (link here, or else it should be at the very top of this newsletter) that he was against the idea at first -- a lot of us might never have had a chance to know his story.
As I wrote last week, in trying to get readers to share their earliest memories, I’ve wanted for a while to figure out how to enable lots and lots of people to record their life stories like this, so that they're not forgotten—especially as people get older.
I think I’m onto it. I'm going to keep experimenting with it here and there in this newsletter, and then quite possibly try to build it into something independent.
Ironically, I guess it's partly because of the same insight Lazarus had all those decades ago: Back then, we had a whole lot of new babies. Now, those same people have a whole lot of stories to share.
7 other things …
Widespread devastation left behind by Hurricane Helene came to light Monday across the South, revealing a wasteland of splintered houses, crushed cargo containers and mud-covered highways in one of the worst storms in U.S. history. The death toll topped 130. A crisis was unfolding in western North Carolina, where residents stranded by washed-out roads and by a lack of power and cellular service lined up for fresh water and a chance to message loved ones days after the storm that they were alive. At least 133 deaths in six Southeastern states have been attributed to the storm that inflicted damage from Florida’s Gulf Coast to the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia. (AP)
Israel launched a ground operation in Lebanon, sharply escalating its offensive against the militant group Hezbollah days after killing its top leader in an airstrike in Beirut. The Israeli military announced Tuesday morning that it launched what it called a limited operation in a number of villages in southern Lebanon near the border to attack Hezbollah targets and infrastructure. (WSJ)
A couple who was involved in a "life-changing" crash cannot sue Uber because they or their daughter ordered a pizza through UberEats months before, and apparently agreed to an arbitration-only condition in the process, according to an appellate court. (WKRC)
California will ban private colleges and universities, including some of the nation’s most selective institutions, from giving special consideration to applicants who have family or other connections to the schools, a practice known as legacy preferences. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation on Monday that will prohibit the practice starting in the fall of 2025. (NY Times)
Pete Rose, who won two World Series titles with his hometown Cincinnati Reds on his path to breaking the all-time hits record but whose stardom disintegrated after he was caught gambling on his team as manager, leading to his banishment from the game and exclusion from the Hall of Fame, died at age 83. (Washington Post)
The UK is about to stop producing any electricity from burning coal - ending its 142-year reliance on the fossil fuel. The country's last coal power station, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, finishes operations this week after running since 1967. (BBC)
At least a dozen employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs improperly accessed the medical records of vice-presidential nominees JD Vance and Tim Walz this summer, VA investigators found, in a violation of federal health privacy laws that is under criminal investigation. Unrelated, I guess: Both nominees square off in their debate tonight. (MSN)
Thanks for reading. Photo credit: YouTube. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments!
I and my brother and sisters did something similar after my mom died. At the wake at our house my dad put out a bunch of B&W photos on a table and there was my mom in a flight jacket standing next to a plane! She apparently wanted to be an engineer before women were allowed in WWII so she signed up to ferry bombers from ME to OH, take the train back and do it again. My dad was nonchalant about the whole thing but none of kids ever heard mom talk about it, not once. So, we sat down with my dad over the course of a year and extracted his life story and my sister edited (she worked for Morris books at the time) it, formatted it, we selected some pertinent photos and bound it in a book. I also took all his letters he wrote home from the Pacific in WWII and donated them and some other info to the WWII museum at Florida State University that atom Brokaw seeded the money and research for. It is a museum of diaries, letters, and documents about how the soldiers and folks at home felt during the war. Your post really brought all that home because that generation had a lot to teach is and much has been lost by not sitting down with them to extract that oral history. Thanks!
I managed to get my father in law to tell me about his life while I recorded it. It was fascinating, and very valuable because it revealed things he'd never told anyone.
Years ago in a borough I taught in there was a Living History project going on in which youngsters interviewed and recorded elderly local residents talking about their lives and the area. The kids found it fascinating.