Blue Krono

[BlueKrono]

Plastic has always held a certain magic for me. Even its origins were to me miraculous. The bodies of prehistoric creatures millions of years old had been extracted from deep beneath the earth, processed, and pressed into wondrous forms. One of these forms was the Marx Kronosaurus. In 1955 the Marx toy company rolled the first of their dinosaur collection off the line, and among them was a long-necked depiction of the marine Kronosaurus, elegant and simple. Now known to be anatomically inaccurate, it was based on a painting by renowned paleoartist Rudolph Zallinger. It was the pursuit of this intriguing figure that had sent me 900 miles from home on a quest for an ancient monster.
   Moundsville, West Virginia lay near the source of the Ohio River, in the heart of coal country. For over 250 years the coal mines have snaked beneath these lands like ancient dragons, chasing their subterranean sustenance: coal – that carboniferous black rock formed from far older plant life millions of years in the past. The area around Moundsville abounds with it, and coal mining has long been the driver of the West Virginian economy.
   Up until 1980 Moundsville was also home to the Louis Marx and Company's largest factory. The first company to make full use of plastics in mass production of toys, by the 1950's they were the largest manufacturer of toys in the world. Marx had high standards for a toy company, and any imperfection would result in the entire batch being tossed, often with perfectly good toys among them. They would be deposited in what has since become known among collectors of antique toys as "the Dump", a few miles outside of town. When the company went out of business in 1980 the factory was closed and the Dump was covered over by the ochre West Virginian soil to await eternity.
   However, the slumber of the rejected toys was disturbed by treasure hunters, intrepid diggers who bribed or evaded the gun-toting landowners of the surrounding properties in order to uncover plastic riches. Some of the toys interred in the Dump were colors that were discarded experiments of the company, having never been released to the public. Marx and dinosaur collectors alike went nuts for these surpassingly rare toys, and the diggers delved ever more extensively in the abandoned dump for over 30 years. Rarest and most prized of all was the color robin's egg blue, only known from specimens extracted from the legendary Marx Dump. I myself had almost every color of the Marx Kronosaurus, except this one. Unlike any other collectible I had ever sought, this one was of a rarity of such caliber that I did not even know for certain that it existed. Had the soil of Moundsville ever divulged such a piece? On August 1st, 2016, I was on my way to find out.
   I met with Francis Turner, owner and curator of the recently closed Marx Toy Museum in Moundsville. Like the dying coal industry, interest in the museum had waned, and it closed its doors permanently a mere three weeks before I arrived. However, if the plundered tombs of the Marx toys were any indication, nothing is truly permanent. After contacting Francis he agreed to give me a private tour of the museum if I paid for the lights and air conditioning to be turned back on that day. He showed me through all the areas of meticulously assembled displays. We even perused the original record books kept by the Marx factory detailing the composition of sets and specifications of individual figures, sitting on the tile floor like wonder-struck children. I knew I had met someone for whom collecting was more than just a hobby. It was a passion. It was life. Here I had found one of my people.
   I had told Francis of my interest in the Marx dinosaurs when I had first contacted him, and he had brought with him a large plastic bin full of them. Another intensive collector from the area had recently passed away, and Francis had acquired his entire collection. Among them was a multitude of dinosaurs from the Dump. Apparently the fruit of hundreds of hours of labor by the determined diggers had ended up with the deceased collector, and now they sat on a table in front of me. There were too many to count, these 60-year-old prehistoric plastic beasts with the distinctive orangish patina that distinguished them as having been laboriously liberated from the earth at the risk of attack by unfriendly, firearm-wielding hill people. Most exciting of all, there were even several Kronosaurs.
   I had seen a batch of Dump dinos the last time I had been in Moundsville, and bought a few just for their rich history, but while that collection was fairly sizable it contained not a single Kronosaurus. Here there were nearly a dozen, out of the hundreds of more common prehistoric denizens. Perhaps even more thrilling, there were also a couple gorgeous robin's egg blue dinosaurs. I showed Francis a perfectly pure blue Triceratops. He took it, examined it curiously... and promptly snapped off one of its legs. I was gobsmacked. I felt as if I had just witnessed someone casually smash a Faberge egg to bits. The rarest and most sought-after color, the one that drives collectors into a frenzy... and he had just irreparably damaged it! He showed me the break – an outer layer of light blue, and an inner core of green, the same common seafoam green seen in fully a third of the lot of dinosaurs. Then he tossed the broken toy in the trash.
   There were a couple of the Kronosaurs that looked slightly different to Francis, and finding some of the smaller dinosaurs of the same shade, he snapped off limbs or butchered them with a pair of scissors. These did go all the way to the core, and were in fact rare, unreleased colors. A mystery had been solved. The coveted robin's egg blue color was not a unique test shot by the Marx toy company. Instead it was the leaching of color of the commonplace green dinosaurs buried beneath the reddish soil of the town in which they had been made, transforming like a diamond underground from something common and mundane as coal into something of unsurpassed rarity and beauty.
   Francis seemed disappointed in uncovering such a revelation. He actually me asked if I was still interested in the blue ones. Even if they weren't truly a rare color of plastic, they still held a tremendous value to me. I had been seeking robin's egg blue dinosaurs for years, and seeing them in person they really were aesthetically quite attractive. What's more, the value in which I held them came more from the thrill of the hunt and the rich history ensconced within their cerulean hide than from what their value might be in the eyes of any other collector. After some negotiation and an indecorous assault upon my savings account I became the proud new owner of a veritable school of multi-hued Kronosauruses, as well as a good number of other dirt-encrusted Dump dinos, some caught in a blue-green intermediate stage of transition to that rarest of colors.
   After our time in the museum Francis showed me other places where he had stashed his sprawling collections of Marx toys. He even invited me to his house, where the entire garage was packed with what was surely one of the most impressive accumulations of Marx products remaining on the planet. There was an upstairs as well, and we climbed the steep staircase up to a couple more rooms with Marx toys displayed on every flat surface. After rummaging through some boxes on a shelf Francis turned around and said, "Is this that color you were talking about?"
   In his hand were two beautiful blue dinosaurs, clear as the Appalachian sky. One was a lumbering Brontosaurus... and the other was a Kronosaurus. I couldn't believe my eyes. He handed them to me, and I held in my hands the object of my years-long search. As the realization dawned on me of the significance of this moment my first instinct was to break down into tears. Then I wanted to laugh, and scream, and dance and jump for joy. But instead I maintained my composure, answering back, "Yeah, that looks like it."
   The one he had handed me was almost completely a solid robin's egg blue, except for about a quarter of the body which showed just the faintest tinge of green, revealing its chthonic origin. In a tiny cavity left over from the molding process a tiny bit of ochre dirt peeked out at me, proof that there could be only one source from which it had come. This was a robin's egg blue Kronosaurus from the fabled Marx toy dump. To me it was perfect. He also found a second Kronosaurus, this one a smooth transition from green to blue, about half in each tone.
   I had paid him his asking price for the big lot, so he accepted my offer of $40 apiece for the two Kronosaurs. I would have paid ten times that amount. Or 100 times. I would have paid whatever it took to own these priceless pieces of history, not just Moundsville's, or the Marx toy company's, but my own. I had seriously considered moving to Moundsville, buying a small piece of land and trying my own excursions into the Dump, perhaps to spend the next three or four decades in search of this very figure. The work had already been done in the 30+ years since the last bulldozer bucketful of dirt had covered the old Dump, and now the precious product of that tedious endeavor had found its way to me.
   Back at the museum I retrieved the broken robin's egg blue Triceratops from the garbage as proof of the internal workings of that enigmatic color. Was the color change the result of the orangish dirt that comprised the dump, an effect of an impure batch of plastic at the factory, or perhaps even caused by an unknown chemical present in the Dump? Only an advanced chemical analysis could begin to answer that question, but we had already solved more of the mystery than we expected to that day. Francis had to get home for dinner, and we walked out of the museum doors, leaving it once again quiet and dark. As he headed for his car he stopped and turned around.
"Hey Peter?"
"Yeah?"
"Call every once in a while."
   I got in my car and headed off. On the drive home I would glance down every so often and glimpse a sight that made my heart flutter every time. In a box on the floor of the passenger seat lay my legendary robin's egg blue Kronosaurus, a treasure so rare I did not know if one was ever made by the Marx toy factory, metamorphosed under precise conditions in the ground just a few miles distant, and finally uncovered by careful excavators. I was prepared to dedicate decades of my life to the pursuit of this elusive prize, and here it was before me, acquired on an improbable but extraordinarily successful quest at the young age of 28. I had found my own Holy Grail of dinosaur collecting, never to be surpassed in value to me, and it will be a treasured heirloom of mine for the rest of my life.

[Derek.McManus]

Absolutely fascinating story...I'm very glad you achieved your ambition!

[Lanthanotus]

Happy I deceided to have read through the whole story, really astonishing - could even make for a nice docutainment episode

I'd guess a story like that in itself would be the holy grail for any collector.

Do you have photos of that snapped Trike? Would be really interesting to know about the reasons for that color transition.

[BlueKrono]

Here's a pic, even though it's harder to see than in person. Can you see the separation between the seafoam green and the robin's egg blue?

[Halichoeres]

That's a great story! I have some toys that exhibit the opposite discoloration (not nearly so old as Marx dump figures, of course). I have a "The Tick" action figure that started out robin's egg blue but has turned into a seafoam green. The Dino Riders Monoclonius yellows in a similar way.

[Killekor]

Very nice story!

Killekor

[Georassic]

Great piece! Well-written. Glad that it crossed my screen so many months after you posted it!

Do you do any professional writing? It has an article quality to it.

[BlueKrono]

I don't, I'm just good at languages. I thought about submitting it to Prehistoric Times. They have a large Marx fan base I think. I'd feel a little awkward getting the Marx Toy Museum curator's permission to submit a story he's in though, especially since it tells how I would have paid more for my long-sought blue Kronosaurus. 

[Libraraptor]

Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful story! A passion that I as a monochrome fanatic can understand very very well!
I am fascinated by the thought that, so to speak, there is a second excavation going on.
Firstly the bones. Secondly the molds.
Fantastic.

I can´t believe I have overlooked this story since October! Where did it hide that long?