LEGO Read online
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 - Back to School
Chapter 2 - I Need a Playroom
Chapter 3 - My First Con
Chapter 4 - Stealing from a Thief
Chapter 5 - Color Changes Everything
Chapter 6 - Brick Separation Anxiety
Chapter 7 - Pink Skulls
Chapter 8 - Everything a Princess Could Wish For
Chapter 9 - I Go on a Playdate
Chapter 10 - I Give My Wife a Beach House
Chapter 11 - The Stranger Side of Building
Chapter 12 - A Man and His Museum
Chapter 13 - It’s Okay, I Work Here
Chapter 14 - Becoming a Brickmaster
Chapter 15 - Danish Rocky and a Real Star Wars Expert
Chapter 16 - A Guest in LEGO’s House
Chapter 17 - Protectors of the Brand
Chapter 18 - Good Luck, Boys, That Thing Is Heavy
Chapter 19 - Building Blind and the Dirty Brickster
Chapter 20 - Children Not Included
Chapter 21 - Kate the Builder
Chapter 22 - You Can Go Home Again
Chapter 23 - There Is No “I” in LEGO
Chapter 24 - Miniland Dad
Epilogue: August 17, 2009
Index
Photo Insert
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright © 2010 by Jonathan Bender. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
Photo credits: Insert pages 4 and 5 © 2009 Kathy Regnier. All others photographs by the author.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Bender, Jonathan, date.
LEGO: a love story / Jonathan Bender.
p.cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-470-40702-8 (cloth).
1. LEGO toys. 2. LEGO Group. 3. Bender, Jonathan—Travel. 4. Journalists—Travel—United States. 5. Handicraft—Competitions. 6. Toys—Psychological aspects.
1. Title.
TS2301. T7B46 2010
688.7’25—dc22
2009031387
For Kate and my family
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the AFOL community for welcoming me into the world of bricks as soon as I stepped into the room. I had an excellent building tutor in Joe Meno—any holes in my building repertoire are of my own doing. Dave Sterling demystified plastics, a testament to his ability rather than to my grasp of science. To Duane Collicott, Andreas Stabno, and their families: thanks for taking me into your homes and lives. Andrew Becraft was an excellent sounding board and gave invaluable feedback as a reader of an early draft. Dan Brown and his staff at the Brick Museum brought back my sense of wonder and reminded me that there is nobody in the world like the American entrepreneur. And thanks to all the fans who answered my questions without hesitation or irritation despite the fact that many were personal and definitely irritating.
The LEGO Group also made it easy to gain access to sources and places. LEGO Community Relations Coordinator Steve Witt helped facilitate relationships within the AFOL community as well as at the company. It still means a lot to me that he showed me his build room. Out at LEGOLAND California, Master Model Builder Gary McIntire convinced me to ride the third roller-coaster of my life through his enthusiasm for his job. Master Model Designer Bill Vollbrecht taught me about the park and what it takes to be a master builder; my thanks to him for the enjoyable afternoon I spent at a SandLUG meeting in his home. Serious Play consultant Gary Mankellow gave me a thorough walkthrough of the business side of LEGO—cheers to Jay Liebenguth for introducing us.
While I was in Billund, Denmark, Jan Christensen was an exceedingly gracious host/tour guide, and the head of LEGO Community Development Tormod Askildsen opened a number of doors. I am still amazed, and grateful, that Jette Orduna trusted me with LEGO’s history in the Idea House.
Thanks to my agent, Jonathan Lyons, a consummate professional who continually exceeds my expectations. At John Wiley & Sons I’d like to thank Ellen Wright for steering the book through to production and my editor, Stephen Power, for making the editing process a discussion. He made my jokes better and the story stronger—all writers should have such an editor. And to Nathan Sawaya—an artist with LEGO bricks—thank you for opening your studio and using your talents to design an unbelievable cover.
My family is my support network: thank you, Mom, Dad, and Andrew. Dad, anytime you feel like putting together the Sears Tower for a third time, I’m there. To all of my family and friends who contributed bricks and encouragement, a heartfelt thank-you. As always, I want to thank my wife, Kate, for her patience and her willingness to build a life alongside me.
1
Back to School
A LEGO cow carousel sits frozen in motion outside the Toy and Plastic Brick Museum in Bellaire, Ohio.
Night has fallen in the school yard. Inside the chain-link fence at 4597 Noble Street in Bellaire, Ohio, a merry-go-round with cows the size of miniature ponies made of LEGO bricks sits frozen in motion on the concrete. A small tin sign to the right of the double doors at the front of Gravel Hill Middle School says the school grounds are closed after dark.
But the doors are open and the lights in the hallway are on. The trumpet notes
of Buena Vista Social Club’s “Chan Chan” echo softly off the tiled walls as a skinny blond-haired guy wearing a military-style cap stacks pirates, Star Wars characters, and superheroes on a six-foot folding table in front of a row of black and red school lockers. Tom Erickson is focusing on getting the minifigure display—an army of LEGO men—just right to greet several hundred attendees of Brick Show 2008, a LEGO fan convention that will open in about six hours.
It’s the first weekend of September, but children haven’t attended classes at Gravel Hill for half a decade, since the middle school was sold at auction in 2004. The building reopened in August 2007 as the Toy and Plastic Brick Museum. The brainchild of Dan Brown, a self-described “adult LEGO enthusiast,” it contains a mishmash of LEGO sculptures and rare LEGO sets sprawled over three floors of the massive tan brick building. A computer recycler by trade, Dan has spent the last three years turning the former middle school into an unofficial LEGO museum.
It’s three in the morning, and I’ve been snapping yellow LEGO bricks into a twenty-foot wall for the better part of six hours. I haven’t seen a kid in the last four; instead, I’ve been building alongside Thomas Mueller, a thirty-two-year-old German transplant living in Los Angeles who is sipping Smirnoff Ice and handing me the bricks. He’s clad in black shorts, a black T-shirt, black socks, and black sneakers. With his round glasses and close-cropped brown hair, he reminds me of the stage managers from my days in musical theater.
While building, my hands develop a rhythm all their own. I roll a brick into my palm using my index finger, which leaves my thumb free to keep grabbing more LEGO bricks from the red bin at my feet. The passage of time is marked by the different parts of my body that begin to ache as I sit cross-legged on the hard linoleum. Both of my legs have fallen asleep up to the calves. A joint or tendon on the side of my right knee has been making an odd popping noise every time I shift my body. But I am inexplicably determined to finish this wall.
It is the fourth and final castle wall that rings a twenty-by-thirty-foot classroom, rising eighteen inches to meet the chalk-rail banister. Dan has erected the first three walls out of yellow LEGO bricks, working into the early morning for several weeks before the convention. He is driven by a compulsion to top last year’s Guinness World Record for “the largest LEGO image in the world.” According to Dan, this will be the world’s largest LEGO castle, even though Guinness isn’t coming to measure.
He also sees this as a tribute to an elusive LEGO set: the Yellow Castle. In 1978, Set 375, Castle, was released in Europe as the first in LEGO’s castle play theme. It came out in the United States three years later as set 375/6075. With a working drawbridge and fourteen knight minifigures, this kit has reached icon status in the adult fan community, with sets going for between $300 and $1,000 on eBay. Lost Yellow Castle sets are like Mickey Mantle baseball cards—given away by unknowing mothers cleaning out their children’s closets. An important milestone in the LEGO Group’s history, the Yellow Castle also represented a new direction for the company because it was the first in a series of sets that focused on a given theme.
“I’m feeling my age,” says Dan, forty-one, as he puts down the plastic tub. “We should qualify for some sort of senior discount on LEGO.”
He has the honor of putting the last brick in place, squatting down just as Tom strolls in carrying two blue 1 × 8 bricks (one stud wide by eight studs long) engraved with the words “Toy & Plastic Brick Museum. World Record Castle Build ’08.” I don’t know it yet, but eight hours later I will be supervising close to a hundred kids as they build the interior scenes that will make up the castle courtyard, connecting the walls with large gray baseplates, the flat LEGO squares that form the ground underneath many brick structures.
It might make some cosmic sense that I’m morphing into an adult fan of LEGO at a former middle school, because it was right around that time in my life when I set down my bricks and didn’t pick them back up for a long time. My LEGO building career likely peaked when I was ten.
When I was in fourth grade, I built a model of the Sears Tower using LEGO pieces and black spray paint with my father in our basement. It is the only thing we’ve ever built together. Neither of us is particularly skilled at home improvement projects. But for one glorious afternoon, using our tiny, primary-color plastic bricks, we seemed as talented as the men who build real skyscrapers.
The model was for the annual “state fair” held by North Stratfield Elementary School, in which each student was assigned a different state as a theme for a project.
“Dad, I got Illinois for the state fair. That’s where Grandma and Grandpa live. And we’re building the Sears Tower,” I informed him, while spinning around a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on our wooden table to point out the two pictures of the landmark monument.
“That’s great. What did you have in mind?” my father asked as he took off his suit jacket and studied the photos. This was phase two of my plan, which secretly involved us using up all my LEGO bricks and then needing to go to the store to buy more.
“We’re going to need a lot of LEGOs,” I managed.
“I think you already have a lot of LEGOs,” he countered.
“You’re right, I do. And we’re going to use them all,” I concurred, showing him my rough drawing in blue ballpoint pen detailing the blocky rise of the tower. My plans ended there, and I expectantly waited for my dad to help craft the rest of the project. He agreed to help supervise construction.
We began construction on Saturday afternoon.
“Did you remember the LEGOs?” asked my dad when he came down to join me in the basement. I hadn’t.
“Don’t worry, I brought them down,” he said, gesturing to the large blue bucket sitting on the shelf below his workbench. My name adorned the side of the bucket, spelled out in large letters formed by multicolor stickers. It was filled to the brim with LEGO bricks and miniature men.
I carefully smoothed out the sheet of paper with my ink blueprints on his worktable. They would not be consulted again. We spent the next two hours building the base out of blue, yellow, and white bricks. My father placed a small pile of rectangular pieces on the table about a foot below my eye level. My fingers grabbed the new pieces, snapping them together easily and watching the tower rise surprisingly quickly. We didn’t talk while we worked, but the silence was comforting. We were building a monument to a monument. When the top of the tower was even with my nose, we began to look at how we might construct the top floors. My dad had brought down the encyclopedia, open to the page with the Sears Tower photographs. My hand-drawn blueprints were ignored as we attempted to match our building to the various photos of the skyscraper.
My father sat back and watched me lay the bricks for this final stage of building. I snapped on square pieces until I had completed the tiered top that helps shape the skyline of Chicago. After a brief pause we repurposed two tube-shape pieces from a LEGO police officers set to form the radio transmitters on top of the tower.
“Looks good,” said my dad.
“It does,” I said, surprised.
“But it’s not done. We have to glue it.”
I looked at my father with naked shock: Glue LEGOs? Was he crazy? You never glued LEGO pieces, because you always tore them apart to build the next jumbled assortment that was meant to be a spaceship, or a truck, or a castle, or something else.
“Otherwise it won’t stay together. It could break,” said my father. He had a point. I became excited about violating one of the LEGO taboos of my youth.
“Let’s do it,” I said eagerly. I ran upstairs to grab popsicle sticks and Elmer’s Glue, the true hallmark of a successful school project. I smeared the glue along the side, and my dad blotted away the extra with a wet paper towel. It felt wrong—and I loved it.
We took a short break to let the glue dry and eat some sandwiches, then we returned to the basement. I barely felt the cold as my father turned on the lights and revealed our structure. I tried to pull it apart to
test its structural integrity. It held. My dad handed me a pair of safety goggles. They didn’t quite fit my face, and I kept my right hand over the side to make sure they stayed on over my glasses. My dad pointed me to a stool a few feet away as he shook a can of black spray paint, a gesture I have since learned would have sent LEGO purists running from the room. He hit the button and a glossy black sheen began to coat the primary-color toy building. In that moment, it became the Sears Tower. A few minutes later we left the basement coughing, the fumes stronger than my father had anticipated.
Waking up the next day was probably as close to a Christmas morning experience as a Jewish kid growing up in Fairfield, Connecticut, could have. I respectfully waited for my dad by the basement door after breakfast, dying to see how the paint had dried.
I was nervous going down the stairs. Nervous that the glue wouldn’t hold or the building would somehow have fallen from the workbench and smashed on the floor. I don’t know if my dad was nervous, I just know that he didn’t say anything either before turning on the light in his workshop.
The light caught the glossy black paint first—a shining monolith in a dusty basement. It stood eighteen inches tall—a jutting series of rectangles that from across the room looked like a building, not a collection of LEGO bricks.
“It came out nice, Davey,” said my dad, using an affectionate nickname that was short for my middle name.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said.
It was one of the happiest moments of my childhood, though I didn’t realize it then. But one rarely recognizes the memories that will last at the time.
Over the next two years, I gradually began to let go of my interest in LEGO. This was my time for oversize tortoiseshell eyeglasses and Benetton sweatshirts with prominent cartoon bears—in short, I made a lot of poor choices. My uncle bought us an eight-bit Nintendo system for Hanukkah one year, and I stopped building spaceships in order to battle Koopa. I was a soccer goalie until the goalposts were increased to regulation size in fifth grade, leading me into a six-year dalliance with musical theater. I flirted with a lot of new loves. And by the time I kissed my first girlfriend, the blue LEGO tub had been left to slumber in the closet.