Since 1971, the Jones family’s Mold-A-Rama machines have pumped out 10 million souvenirs.
These days, it’s a smaller operation: They own 63 machines in five states, including more than a dozen at the Brookfield Zoo. Their only competition is Florida-based Mold-A-Matic, which has been in the molded-plastic souvenir game even longer; they primarily serve Florida amusement parks and zoos across the South.
Like other creations gathering dust in our closets, the Mold-A-Rama began as an act of homegrown ingenuity.named J.H. “Tike” Miller — whom the exhibition describes as a “serial entrepreneur” — was looking for a way to replace the figures in his Nativity scene. When the U.S. halted imports from Germany during World War II, he sought a way to craft new statues with injection molding. Having solved Nativity shortages, he moved on to aliens and animals.
By the early ‘70s, however, the ARA was ready to scrap its Mold-A-Rama division. That’s when the Jones family stepped in. William Jones, Paul’s father — now in his 80s, and still a co-owner with his son — bought Mold-A-Rama machines and expanded. They hired freelance artists to craft what became a menagerie of miniature plastic statues:
Alligators and gorillas and devils and Frankensteins and Toledo Mud Hens and Canadian maple leaves and the Sears Tower and eagles and Christmas trees and Mickey Mouse and Kewpie dolls and two types of Abraham Lincoln. Even the bus inside which Rosa Parks made history. For the Milwaukee County Zoo, they make bats, Santa Claus and sea horses. For the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan, they make a tiny Henry Ford, an adorable Wienermobile and, ghoulishly, the Lincoln in which JFK was assassinated.
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