Some of you already know Louie from my "Louie's Day at the Park" article. After sitting with him over a couple of breakfasts, I've decided capture more of this beautiful man's rich life.

To be honest, I have to admit that even after knowing Louie for 15 years, I never really know him at all. Sure I knew that he was a big baseball fan and that he's a talented craftsman, and maybe even that he's a little fussy about the things he likes to eat. However, I really didn't know Louie until talking with him about how he got to be such a talented craftsman and artist.

As it turns out, Louie is one seven children all born in Canada to Italian immigrants Antonio and Maria Di Florio who came to Canada like so many others seeking a better life for their children than they might have had themselves. Their kids, shown here from left to right, are Robert, Jenny, Danny, Armando, Domenic, Eleanor, Louie. It was Louie's older brother Dominic, nicknamed “Flatty” because of his flat feet, that originally taught Louie how to sketch, carve and work with balsa wood. Louie attended Jarvis Collegiate, a vocational school where his teacher, Mr. Pepper, took note of his sketching and painting skills and suggested that Louie should try to work for Disney because animated movies were becoming very popular and animators were in demand. Louie was drafted by the Canadian military for the Second World War but was eventually rejected due to a ruptured ear drum. Because of tough economic times, attending school was becoming less of a priority than helping carry the load at home. As a result, it was thought best that Louie should enter the work world at the tender age of 18.

In 1939, a Toronto based company named Reliable Toy Company, run by the three Samuel brothers, Sol, Alex and Ben, was thriving on the popularity of their Reliable Dolls. They happened to be located not far from Louie's family home in Treford Place, part of Toronto’s second Little Italy near College and Grace. Knowing that Louie had some developing skills in carving, sketching and painting, his mother Maria, told him, "you should. Just go down there and tell them you want a job". On his first trip to Reliable's factory on Carlaw   Avenue, between Dundas and Queen Streets, Ben Samuel told him they weren’t hiring. Unshaken by this and with further encouragement from Maria, Louie went back the next morning. It was the beginning of a shift and all the workers were entering the plant. "I got nervous and just walked right in with them and found a spot at a station that I thought I could handle and sat down". It was a station beside several others where workers were taking in doll heads and removing the flashing or remanents from the molding process. So Louie started working but soon one of the owners came by and asked him where he came from. Luckily, an Italian foreman named Tom Bozzo came by and said “We needed some more help and I asked him to join us this morning”. Thus began Louie's employment in the Toronto toy business.

Louie quickly moved into more artistic roles and much of his work with Reliable eventually moved into the paint room where he worked at mixing shades of paint and painting samples and production toys. His most "royal" experience is that he designed the Canadian Eskimo doll that was presented to the Queen. Louie received a request from the front office to come up with a very high quality Eskimo doll for a purpose that was not revealed to him at first. Louie started with a Shirley Temple doll face since, he told me, "she had a bit of a slant to her eyes that would work well for the Eskimo look". However, he had to mix the face paint just right to achieve the appropriate skin tone. Then he made her a little mink jacket and moccasins and "she looked just perfect". Louie later found out that his doll was presented to Queen Elisabeth, the Queen Mother, by the Hudson’s Bay Company in Winnipeg during on her tour across Canada. Of course, Louie was given no special credit for this but that is the way the business world generally works so it’s not surprising I guess.

Louie also told me that he got to be a movie star at one point. It seems that the National Film Board wanted to do a documentary on the toy business and Reliable was a major feature of the show. Because Louie possessed some of the more exacting and interesting skills like painting toy’s hands and faces, he was picked to explain these processes on camera. "It was a great opportunity, the show was hosted by Lloyd Bochner and I was the leading man" Louie said about the shoot and the documentary.

Included here are some shots of the two of them from that film and a short video clip. I think Louie even out performed Lloyd but of course I’m biased.

As mentioned earlier, Louie became a key player in the paint shop and mixing paint was his specialty. At one point when Louie was looking for more opportunity in the business, his paint mixing skills became critical. "My dad always told me, 'Tell people generally what you do, but NEVER show them how to do it' so that's exactly what I did."  Louie soon quit Reliable and went to work with his friend Tom Bozzo who was starting up his own toy business, Border City Toys, in Windsor, Ontario. Shortly after his departure, a supervisor named Louis Blackstein came looking for Louie and offered him 3 times his previous wage to come back and mix a particular navy blue for a Royal Mounted Police doll that was selling very well because they were down to the last barrel of paint. Then there was the time that they came to Louie because they had 50 barrels of 1/2 spheres and asked Louie what they should do with them. So Louie went looking for ideas in Eaton’s’ and Sears in downtown Toronto (on a Saturday of course because they wouldn't give him time off for research). Louie found that baby rattles seemed to be selling particularly well. "I found this very cute picture of a kitten and I painted the kitten on one half sphere and painted the other half with a bright pink or powder blue and they used every one of those 50 barrels up - but of course, I didn't get anything special for that" Louie told me.

Growing tired of making Reliable successful for very little in return, Louie decided to go it on his own one day. "At Reliable, we were working on a popular selling plush stuffed skunk. I figured I could make an even cuter one if I changed the design a bit and made the skunk have one winking eye. So, I took the face to one of my friends who was in the business of doing that type of plastic molding and we designed the change. The face came out great and I gave it a nice plush black body with a big white stripe from its eyes to its tail. That little guy was beautiful. I took it to S.S. Kresge’s and pitched it to them. They placed an order for 21,000 and my business was off the ground." Louie's skunk eventually became extremely popular with the auto community. "Someone got the idea that this winking skunk looked good sitting in the back deck of a sedan and soon every second car that you saw had one" Louie told me proudly. "I couldn't make enough of those things."

Eventually Louie had his own shop with between 8 and 10 ladies sewing for him. He would do the design, selling and even the deliveries. "I used to have this big van and I had customers all over the place. I delivered to stores and distributors in Montreal; I would love that drive in the fall. I would always plan one of my trips in late September or early October. It was so beautiful making that drive at that time of the year with all of the colours in the trees and the lakes reflecting a deep blue sky".

Business was good for Louie but he didn't take it for granted or forget how he got his start. He told me that "One time at a toy trade show in Montreal, I ran into my old employer Alex Samuel. I asked him if he wanted to come into my suite at the show and see where the really good stuff was. When Alex looked around, he said ‘These are really great’ and I told him that I had a great teacher”. I really liked and respected Alex. I went to his funeral when he died suddenly in his late 40s. He was a good man and a good mentor, I missed him a lot"

Louie’s talents didn’t stop at toys, he was also an excellent hockey player; he played in the Toronto Italian League and in a couple of industrial leagues. However, fact that Louie liked goaltending most presented both a problem and an opportunity. “In those days, buying goalie pads and gloves was a major expense and our family wasn’t too well off. I went by this sports store to pick up some equipment and there were a set of goalie pads from one of the pros in for repairs. I looked them over and figured that I could make my own so that’s what I did.”

In this picture, you can see Louie as the goalie for the St. Agnes Intermediate team in a pair of his had-made goalie pads.  Louie told me that “I guess I played hockey for about 25 years and went through about 6 or 7 sets of pads. I never wore a set of store-bought pads, I made them all”.

 Louie worked on his own for about 22 years and retired from the toy trade just a few years before I met him in 1997. But as you may know from my previous article on this great man, he's still making planes, trains and automobiles in his basement workshop. In his latest project, he's making a 4x scale replica of a Lego MX motorcycle, complete with the rider, which will have all the detail and full movement of the original Lego pieces. This will be yet another custom toy for one of his great-grandchildren.

Not long after joining Reliable Toys, Louie got married to his beautiful bride Violet and they are still going strong after 71 years together at the time of this posting. They later had two children, Anthony and Marilyn, whom I know well, and they are also great people which isn’t surprising given who their parents are.

While we were chatting during our latest breakfast outing, that the topic of animated toys came up and we wondered how long it would be before we see fully animated toys where a toy could be like your dog or cat. Louie said “We’re getting there, I can see a day like that.”  Louie went on to say that he does have one regret. “I wish I would have gotten into computers, that’s one thing that I would have liked to have done next.” I asked him what he would have liked to do with computers and his answer was simple yet intriguing; “I’m not sure but I guess I would have figured out something”. Knowing of his skills in so many areas, I’m absolutely sure that if he would have picked up on computers, it would have been just another medium that he would have mastered with gracious humility.

I've known Louie for 15 years and I was well aware that he was a very talented person. However, it was only in the last little while that I found out that he possessed such richness and the deep experience of participating in the booming Toronto toy trade for almost half of the 20th century. I wish my dear old friend many more wonderful projects.

On a related note, and from a Kamazooie perspective, it is a gift that people with experiences like Louie’s live in our neighborhoods and in our towns or cities yet we hardly really know them. I would like to invite existing or new members to find these treasures and encourage them to share their experience for the benefit of others who might have interests in pursuing similar career, hobby or artistic endeavors.